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PaperclipPerfector  1yr ago (text post)   3460 thread views

Friday Fun Thread for September 8, 2023

Be advised: this thread is not for serious in-depth discussion of weighty topics (we have a link for that), this thread is not for anything Culture War related. This thread is for Fun. You got jokes? Share 'em. You got silly questions? Ask 'em.

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https://www.richardhanania.com/p/the-case-against-most-books

Tldr: Most books are not information-dense.

I largely agree. It seems to me that most writing has many more examples than required (I might need only 2 to get the point, 5 is far too many), long and numerous analogies, etc.

Do you have any examples of writing that actually follows the DRY (Don't Repeat Yourself) principle?

I've also realized that the DRY principle is a great thing for writing code but terrible for conversation. If you only say what needs to be said, then you come off as "dry". I suppose 1 more reason added to the "conversation isn't about exchanging ideas or information" bin.

@HelmedHorror @curious_straight_ca @FCfromSSC @fmaa @sun

This article does a great job of making the point that the past is important.:

If there are axioms in Silicon Valley, at the top of the list must surely be the belief that we’re making onward and upward progress. Spend any time in a non-catatonic state in any cafe or popular hangout on University Ave in Palo Alto, or in Sunnyvale, Menlo Park, or Mountain View, and you’ll quickly realize you’re in a culture that’s entirely focused on the future, and thinks technology, or “technoscience” is what counts, and not much else. (Full disclosure: I was an entrepreneur in Palo Alto, and to be fair, obsessing about the future is what entrepreneurs do. But this is not what I mean here.) The mindset is ubiquitous. Even advocates of what I’ve called “Fearesome AI” (as opposed to “Dreamy AI”), who worry about the existential risks of AI run amok, are really just the flip side of the exponential progress coin. They’ve bought into the myth of exponential progress, too. Techno-futurists and increasingly a confused media and public simply take for granted that we’re on a rocketship to technological wonders, which somehow also equates to a theory of history and human progress writ large.

One terrible consequence of this pervasive thinking (besides being totally wrong, as I’ll explain) is the short shrifting of all things historical. As Renaissance thinkers like Petrarch well knew, the past is a treasure trove of not just human folly but human greatness. Chronicalled in the past are civilizations surviving and thriving for millenia, and artistic and engineering feats that in some cases remain unrivaled today. So, why are we so cocksure about 21st century progress? Can anyone today write like James Joyce or Leo Tolstoy, or Virginia Wolf? Who rivals Leonardo Da Vinci in their understanding of figure and form? Where are the orators like Cicero? The essayists and humanists like Montaigne? The philosophers like Plato, or Aristotle, or Lucretius or Epicurus? Or, for that matter, Alan Turing and John Von Neumann? We have our own talents, to be sure, but this doesn’t cancel the great talents of the past, or somehow render them obsolete and otiose. Yes, we do build on the past. But we also learn from it.

Alas, the ahistorical bubble we’re currently living in not only doesn’t look back but seemingly can’t look back, as if it would stall progress and mire us in bigotry and irrelevance rather than provide insight, knowledge and wisdom. It’s a profoundly simplistic and troubling view. We are not just building “on top of” the past like legos, we must continuously return to it to get our own bearings. There’s a cyclical nature to progress. In this spirit, I’ll be developing the theme of “the return,” or as the Italian Renaissance thinker Giambattista Vico called it, the ricorso. (My next book is titled The Return: Why the 21st Century Looks Like the Past (so far), Not the Future We Wanted. More on this in future posts.)

Literally the single actual point anywhere in this article is that the very vague and informal metric that is Moore's law is slowing down. It doesn't even attempt arguing for the past's importance, letting alone doing a great job at it. It just lists off a series of applause lights and hopes you don't notice it never puts forth any actual arguments.

Argues that there are things the ancients can do we still can’t reproduce today? Asks if any modern writers are as good as former ones? Etc

It doesn't actually argue this since it doesn't specify any of these things, except Da Vinci's understanding of figure and form. Which I think is matched by millions of art students worldwide who've practiced figure drawing. The internet is flooded with artists of absolutely astounding technical skill by historical standards and no one cares.

He doesn't give any criteria to judge the various categories of writers by. Or even give a category for Turing and Von Nuemann. As computer scientists, they knew far less than any halfway competent CS student these days. And these students do not learn from their original writings because other people have since found better ways to formulate their results. As pioneers in a nascent field of science, who or what field are you comparing them to and finding the modern analogues wanting?

To expand on the second paragraph point because it's relevant to the original discussion, there's no reason to believe that the first person to come up with an idea would also come up with the best way to structure and explain it.

And indeed, students in any hard science don't learn from the original writings of the pioneers in their field, because that would be a very inefficient way to learn. The original writings serve mostly as a historical curiosity. And as the contrapositive, I feel that any field where people overly focus on the original texts immediately shows itself to be more about status signaling games than any actual content.

Asks if any modern writers are as good as former ones?

What if I said yes and pointed at a random author I liked better than Tolstoy? It's a matter of opinion.

Tolstoy had his share of more refined critics as well.

there are things the ancients can do we still can’t reproduce today

Are there? I can't remember off the top of my head anything we genuinely "can't reproduce", as opposed to "can't be assed to".

Roman concrete? Although I think we recently cracked that one.

Greek fire?

I count "we have better alternatives" as "can't be assed". Does it really matter that we don't know the precise formula they used because they haven't written it down? We have concrete. We have napalm. We probably have ways to make them in a low-tech environment - would have to check one of those "uplifter isekai protagonist's cheat sheets" for that.

Multiple examples are valuable because they are establishing a body of evidence. Hanania has a vested interest in ignoring this when (and only when) it suits his contrarian, incisive brand. He is certainly happy to use it in the article, where he provides many questionable examples.

That was the most ridiculous thing I have ever read, and that should mean a lot, because I have read many books, papers, articles, comics, and pamphlets - and some of them were ridiculous on purpose. That was so ridiculous I actually needed to put down my phone and take a walk after reading it, so I didn't pop a blood vessel in rage.

According to the great moral leader Sam Bankman-Fried,

I don’t want to say no book is ever worth reading, but I actually do believe something pretty close to that…If you wrote a book, you fucked up, and it should have been a six-paragraph blog post.

Ideally, one would like to think that if someone is quoting SBF and calling him a great moral leader they would be doing so ironically and would dismiss his foolishness. In fact I assumed at first this was some Straussian mockery of people with strange judgements about reading, like when I say shit like "I don't read non-fiction because I am not a child". If that turns out to be the case then well done Hanania, you got me good. It has been interpreted as legit though, and I really need to work out my anger, I haven't been this triggered in ages.

The vast majority of books are like this in some way. Any Substack essay I have written could’ve been a book if I had the time or inclination to make it into one.

This is the catchphrase of mediocrity in denial. Great authors/artists/musicians aren't great, they just aren't as time conscious as me. It takes a thousand hours to master anything my man, which is why I can say without irony that Michaelangelo is lucky he didn't have to deal with all the drama I do, and that drama is the only reason I am not a world class painter too.

Now you might say that wasn't his point, that he is pointing out that a lot of books out there are repetitive garbage or full of cours that weren't in the manga or deceptively written to shoehorn in an agenda, to which I would say that a) he still said it, and b) no argument there, but it brings us to the second point - sturgeon's law.

According to Google in 2010 129,864,880 books had been published - yes, this is before the self publishing boom. Of course that means over a hundred million complete duds, because that's how humans operate. But it also means millions of works of genius. His first example of a shitty book is David Sinclair’s Lifespan, published in 2019. Sinclair apparently pads it out with:

he addresses issues that are ancillary to conquering aging like what’s going to happen to social security and the impact of a growing population on global warming. He also comes out for universal healthcare, legalized euthanasia, and more income equality

But, uh, that doesn't sound like padding to me? That sounds like a bunch of issues everyone always brings up any time people talk about lengthening life expectancy? "What will happen to pensions and hospitals and infrastructure if nobody dies?" is a pretty good question to ask imo. Hanania seems more upset that Sinclair's resolutions are left wing.

I haven't read the book though, so maybe it is just padding. It doesn't matter, no one who would call himself a genius should be allowed to fall to such obvious recency bias. Since the self publishing boom sturgeon's law has gained at least 9 percentage points, and yes that affects traditionally published books, they all share the same market. Books are getting stupider because we are getting stupider - but that's not on the books! And it certainly doesn't affect the most upsetting part of his argument - his dismissal of old books.

To be fair, he does acknowledge that there are more quality old books than new books, and he does seem to read a lot more non fiction than fiction - and non fiction is much more susceptible to perverse outside incentives because we built an industry around employing liberal arts majors called academia and it's very good at tricking otherwise intelligent people. But he's still fucking wrong!

Side note -

But we should take opportunity costs seriously. Given all the other things you could be reading like scientific papers and news magazines, not to mention other things you could be doing with your time, which non-fiction books are worth reading cover-to-cover?

"You take up my time,

Like some cheap magazine,

When I coulda been learning something,

Oh well, you know what I mean,"

What an economical use of language! Hanania doesn't go far enough, he is too enamoured with his words - I say no books, no papers, no articles - if you can't work your message into a pop song you are an onanist waffling about nothing.

Moving on, Hanania has 3 categories of books he thinks are worth reading, and I am annoyed with him about all of them.

Category 1: History books

When learning history, one can always decide at how granular of a level to investigate an era, topic, or important figure. Most social science or political science books are padded with filler because there are only so many interesting things you can say about most ideas. But history is different; you can always go into more detail about World War II, or the life stories of Ottoman sultans, or the fall of Rome. Even a thousand-page book on a historical topic can only capture a small slice of reality. The returns to reading history are somewhat linear — five hundred pages on World War II give you more insight than a 5-page summary, which gives you more than 5 paragraphs. If you were inclined to read 5,000 pages, you’d get more still, but we generally don’t have the time for that. Most things are not like this. I can’t say the same for, say, Jonathan Haidt’s Moral Foundations Theory. I think it can be explained in a few paragraphs, plus some charts. I loved David Reich’s Who We Are, which used the tools of paleoanthropology to go into the history of various major regions of the world. Unlike with Sinclair’s book, it didn’t feel that much of my time was wasted.

When learning history, one can always decide at how granular of a level to investigate an era, topic, or important figure.

Absolutely true, for approximately 1% of human history. What a ridiculous thing to say. Like everyone on the planet, Hanania doesn't know what he knows or even what he doesn't. Which period of history do we know the most about? The current one obviously, followed by the previous, then the one before that and so on all the way back to Gutenberg. Why? Because that's what has been written about. Not in history books, there are no history books about the Tennies or Noughties, but in the very social science and political science books he derides, not to mention the self help books, the memoirs, the business guides, the diy books, the cookbooks, the magazines. Those books are our history. When Hanania is declaring the tweet the ultimate information delivery system he says:

It’s just that reading the book is a large commitment, and puts you at the mercy of one author, who probably took way too long to make his points for reasons of ego and career interest.

And then recommends you filter your understanding of history through whoever chose to write about it. Because authors of histories have no egos or careers?

Side note 2: Side noter - He also says:

Substacks and Tweets are actually efficient methods of transferring information because you cut out so much of the useless fluff people include when they’re trying to build a CV.

"Read substacks and Twitter!" says the guy who has made it big on substack and Twitter. But rest assured it is definitely not for reasons of ego and career interest.

Category 2: Books of Historical Interest

You may want to read Kant, Plato, and the Bible, because many people have been reading them for a very long time, and you want to be a participant in the wider culture. I don’t believe in the “wisdom” to be found in Great Books (see below). But I want to understand my fellow man. A large portion of people who live under the same polity as I do think that the Bible is the literal word of God, so it’s useful to get a glimpse into their reality. Similar things could be said about the Koran or the writings of Confucius. It’s like how one reason to read the NYT is that everyone else is reading it. So not only do you get the value of the news itself, but also insights into what’s considered culturally and socially important.

I don’t believe in the “wisdom” to be found in Great Books (see below). But I want to understand my fellow man.

Now it's all coming together, he's appealing to the old rationalist canard: "Everyone is a fucking idiot except me. So I only have to put 10% effort into something they have to give their all to to extract all the value." I think every motter has made that mistake before, I certainly have. But the overwhelming majority of Christians have never read the whole bible, and never will. You won't understand them better if you know which fabrics the bible says you shouldn't mix, because they have nfi what you are talking about.

The other examples are illustrative however. We have the Koran, the writings of Confucius, and the New York Times. Hanania is telling us who his fellows are - the educated middle class. Not necessarily people who read the Koran and Confucius and the NYT, but people who want to have read those things. If he wanted to understand the majority of people in his polity he'd be promoting watching football and tiktok compilations. This is not meant as a dig, like tlp used to say behaviour informs identity, and educated middle class people are often fantastic people by all metrics. But like tlp also probably said (actually, looking back I feel like you could put this preamble before every sentence I've written so far, but we're in too deep now) your preferences are not your stated preferences. Or in other words.

Category 3: Genius Takes You on a Journey

This final category covers works where you have some combination of a brilliant author who is a great storyteller and an important topic. I check out all of Steven Pinker’s books, because he’s a pleasure to read, he addresses fascinating issues, and I have trust in his judgment and intellect. One of the most valuable books I’ve ever read is Judith Rich Harris’ The Nurture Assumption, as I think the question of nature versus nurture is one that individuals should dig deep into before they even begin forming political opinions.

Some books fall into more than one of the categories above. I’d put On the Origin of Species in categories 2 and 3. The Federalist Papers are worth checking out for insights into the thinking of the men who founded this country, and they might even have some useful things to tell us since we’re still living under the system they designed.

I’ve published one book and have another on the way. I like to think that they’re both combinations of 1 and 3. My book on American foreign policy had two chapters devoted to international relations theory, and the rest gives you my take on topics like the US-Soviet relationship in the 1920s and 1930s and the war on terror, making it useful as a history of American foreign policy. If it was an entire book on IR theory detached from any kind of deep historical analysis, and those have been written, reading it all would probably be a waste of your time. My next book serves as a history of where wokeness came from, and provides practical political advice on what to do about it.

I check out all of Steven Pinker’s books, because he’s a pleasure to read, he addresses fascinating issues, and I have trust in his judgment and intellect.

You probably expected me to target the advert paragraph at the end there in my breakdown, but this line is saying the quiet part out loud. Obviously the whole article is essentially a promo for his new book in a fairly typical format - "Has this ever happened to you? Woman reading book slowly turns pages until her eyes fall out of her head from banality There's got to be a better way! And now there is, History of Woke by Richard Hanania, in all good bookstores." So it seems to me like a mistake to pair it with an explanation that Hanania likes to read Pinker for the same reasons everyone likes to read anything - interest, understanding and entertainment.

Moving on again we get to the part that made me put my phone down and go for a walk: Against Great Books

When I wrote my piece on Enlightened Centrism, some took issue with me saying that I don’t believe in Great Books. After thinking about the topic a bit, I’m more certain that I’m correct. One might read old books for historical interest (Category 2), but the idea that someone writing more than say four hundred years ago could have deep insights into modern issues strikes me as farcical. If old thinkers do have insights, the same points have likely been made more recently and better by others who have had the advantage of coming after them.

See, if we move the goalposts enough I was totally right about great books! Sure they might provide valuable insight into history, and the mindset of great people, they might be a pleasure to read, a good way to pass time, provide lessons applicable outside the scope of their interest, give me a shared language of references and symbols and even act as props to signal my identity to others, but they tell us nothing about trans ideology! Aristotle hasn't even heard of inflation, never mind hyper-inflation! Besides, someone else has probably tweeted about the book, just read the tweet! Something something shadows on the wall amirite?

This isn’t an issue of thinking every previous generation was dumb. Imagine hearing that we just discovered a tribe in the Amazon that previously had no contact with other humans. Nonetheless, this group developed a writing system. Living among them is an individual who they consider the world’s greatest philosopher. Being part of an isolated tribe, this philosopher has had no formal education or exposure to any modern ideas. He doesn’t know about evolution, has never logged on to the internet, has learned nothing of human history outside of the oral tradition of his tribe, and doesn’t even know whether the world is round or why the seasons change. Would it be plausible to believe that this Amazon philosopher had something to teach us about the way our government should be organized or whether the US should adopt protectionist trade policies?

Hey how's this for irony? Not only is this entire paragraph poorly reasoned, it would have been useless even if it wasn't. What information can we pull from this that hasn't been presented already? I've even already mentioned the fatal flaw in this paragraph's argument - it's goalpost moving. Why, Richard, would you ask an indigenous Amazonian philosopher about trade policies or government? If we hit you over the back of the head, stripped you naked and dropped you in the middle of the Amazon rainforest, can we conclude you definitely aren't a Journeying Genius when you inevitably die in agony? Or would it be bizarre to expect a member of the chattering class to have the knowledge and insight necessary to survive such an alien experience?

Most people I think would say no, regardless of how smart he is. We might be fascinated by the Amazon philosopher, but wisdom one can learn from requires some baseline level of knowledge. If you reject the possibility that the Amazon philosopher has great insights into the modern world, on what basis would you trust Ancient Greece?

This is the paragraph where I returned to my earlier conclusion that this was all very sharp satire. Hanania is not an idiot, that is clear, so I do not for one second buy that he doesn't see the disconnect between the insights of a previously uncontacted indigenous Amazonian philosopher and the insights of the primogenitor of Western fucking civilization.

Side note 3: Season of the Witch - I’m about to get to my point, I promise, but one final aside:

A few months ago, I picked up Meditations by Marcus Aurelius, after Ross Douthat said I subscribe to pagan morality, which I took as a compliment (…) You might want to read the Stoics out of historical curiosity. I’ll claim them as part of my intellectual tribe to signal that I reject the moral underpinnings of both Christianity and wokeness, the two most powerful faiths in our society.

Starfucking aside, I don’t think Richard has read Meditations. Either that or he really has no idea whatsoever what Christian morality is. Edit: Because Meditations in particular is surely the most Christian work of Pagan philosophy in existence.

It’s not simply that the ancients had less information and access to empirical data, but ways of thinking have improved over time. Bertrand Russell once quipped that Aristotle believed that men had more teeth than women, but it never occurred to him to open his wife’s mouth and start counting.1 One of the best essays I’ve read in a long time is “You live in a world that philosophy built,” by Trevor Klee. We take the basics of the scientific method for granted today, but only after generations of newer scholars throwing off the shackles of official dogma.

And here we reach my favourite paragraph in the piece, and where I will end my pedantic nitpicking, because it essentially dismantles itself. The footnote reads thus:

Reading the link I provided, it seems like Aristotle might have actually been relying on the observations of others, who he thinks counted male and female teeth. The quote is

Males have more teeth than females, in the cases of humans, sheep, goats, and pigs. In other species an observation has not yet been made.

So it sounds like he may have been using proper scientific procedures, and we can only fault him for at worst not double checking. Then again, it’s unclear what he meant by “observation” here, it could’ve been something like “some other guy said it,” in which case Russell’s point would stand. And why would the ancients have gotten the number of teeth wrong across multiple species? It makes sense if they were just making things up, but not if they were actually checking their work. (Updated 5/11/23)

If you are just joining us, Hanania just successfully demonstrated the value in reading the actual words old assholes wrote instead of relying on quips about their writing by other old assholes. I'm not sure if Hanania read the link he provided before writing his piece - it kind of seems like he didn't - the link itself does a great job of explaining the problem, which is called memetic drift.

See Bertrand Russell hated Aristotle, because Bertrand Russell was a contrarian asshole (most of my heroes are.) Ok, maybe that's not why, but it's true. And that's the point. As any fan of the scientific method should know, the ONLY source you can fully trust is a primary source. The only way you will ever know exactly what was written in The Nicomachean Ethics is if you read The Nicomachean Ethics.

I am not saying Aristotle was a primary source and therefore we can believe his History of Animals about women's teeth. What I am saying is that it is unscientific to believe Bertrand Russell's description of Aristotle's beliefs, because Russell had his own agenda and point he was making. Russell wasn't just shitting on Aristotle for no reason - The Impact of Science on Society is a brilliant book I hope everyone on the motte has read, even if I disagree with some of the conclusions - Russell was making a point about the difference between being guided by authority and being guided by evidence, and for that it works excellently. But it's not a good way to learn about Aristotle, because it isn't about Aristotle.

The last point I will bring up is prosody. Words don't just mean their definition, they are always contextual. Last week someone was saying they didn't understand Moldbug's appeal, and it's the same thing. I don't care for him either, but for the people who do, the excessive way he writes is a fundamental component. It speaks to them on a level deeper than definitions, and as a result they get much more out of it. That's the real appeal of Great Books - they are read and promoted and reread and repromoted over centuries because they speak to people in a way that provides more insight than a couple of tweets.

And that's why fiction will always provide more insight than non-fiction. The story is the natural way humans understand things and it communicates beyond the words on the page. Just always keep in mind that the map is not the territory, because it can be easy to forget and when you start thinking life works like a story everything goes to shit.

Edit: clarity

According to the great moral leader Sam Bankman-Fried,

I don’t want to say no book is ever worth reading, but I actually do believe something pretty close to that…If you wrote a book, you fucked up, and it should have been a six-paragraph blog post.

Sounds like something someone hopped up on speed (or its legal pharmaceutical equivalents) most of their life would say.

I'm not sure I follow your point about Great Books like Aristotle. It's always seemed so obvious to me that these books are rather pointless except as a historical interest. The people who wrote them were so primitive by comparison, so limited in their empirical knowledge, so deprived of the progress in thought that we've made as a species, I can't fathom why someone would think that they have anything interesting to say on its own merits. And that's not to mention how impenetrable the prose is (apparently translators always think their job is robotically faithful reproduction instead of their best guess about what a modern writer would have written if attempting to express the same thought.)

You say they "speak to" people in some deep way. I'm not really sure what that means, but if their ideas are that impressive and timeless then surely someone more modern has has said the same thing but without the handicap of an ancient person's understanding of the world and our place in it?

Are you sure "read the classics" is an imperative containing much more than signaling about the speaker's supposed learnedness and sophistication? Because it's always been extremely hard for me to shake that impression, and I'm afraid I'm definitely not disabused of it from reading your response to Hanania. I see no good defense of the merits of reading those works.

Good argument. Now tell me what to read instead.

Depends on the topic, of course. Also, people's opinions will obviously vary as to what is a compelling book on any given topic.

Nah, there’s totally value beyond signaling.

You don’t learn things by direct download. You build heuristics out of collected evidence, and generally speaking, more evidence is more better.

Sun Tzu has a bit where he warns people not to corner their enemies. The rationale is obvious: a man who has nothing to lose will cause more damage than one who has an out. You don’t need ancient Chinese history to realize this. But it makes you a little more aware of the concept.

It's always seemed so obvious to me that these books are rather pointless except as a historical interest. The people who wrote them were so primitive by comparison, so limited in their empirical knowledge, so deprived of the progress in thought that we've made as a species, I can't fathom why someone would think that they have anything interesting to say on its own merits.

In what ways specifically were they primitive, or are we advanced? Which core elements of the human experience have changed, and how, between their time and ours? Do the experiences of death, pain, fear, glory, fame, popularity, joy, comfort, friendship, love, hatred, childhood, parenthood, learning, ambition, greed, jealousy, loyalty, uncertainty, risk, value, profit, loss, poverty, wealth, aging, madness, irrationality, bias, intuition, wisdom or any other significant aspect of the human condition operate differently now, relative to then? If so, how?

What is the specific empirical knowledge they lacked, and why does that lack make their analysis irrelevant? What is the precise empirical discovery that opened the doors of enlightenment to mankind?

How, specifically, has thought "progressed" since their time, such that their thoughts should contain no value? What were they wrong about, and how do we know they were wrong about it?

If what you say is true, the above should be easy questions to answer. I don't think they are, but perhaps I'm wrong?

In what ways specifically were they primitive, or are we advanced? Which core elements of the human experience have changed, and how, between their time and ours? Do the experiences of death, pain, fear, glory, fame, popularity, joy, comfort, friendship, love, hatred, childhood, parenthood, learning, ambition, greed, jealousy, loyalty, uncertainty, risk, value, profit, loss, poverty, wealth, aging, madness, irrationality, bias, intuition, wisdom or any other significant aspect of the human condition operate differently now, relative to then? If so, how?

Our experience of death has been totally revolutionized by science and medicine. It's gone from a capricious and incomprehensible god that strikes down half of your children in their most vulnerable years and everyone else randomly, to a mechanism we understand and successfully fight, and one that we've, for the most part, pushed back to the elderly years.

Pain - it turns out that physical pain can mostly be alleviated by molecules of 10-40 atoms or so. A fact of nature suddenly, once you understand the particular proteins behind it, becomes quite malleable.

Fear - was fear of the wiles of nature - not enough rain, too much rain, an evil spirit causes your crops to wilt - and then you just die. Fear of wildlife, random bands of raiders, plague. All of that is, if you're an upper-middle-class person in a western country, pretty much gone! Your fears are of doing poorly in school or at work, not doing well socially or with women, maybe having a medical emergency that doesn't fit through the bureaucracy. Of not having purpose or community. Or exaggerated simulacra of past fears that inflame the passions - fear of school shootings, fear of murders, fear of climate collapse, fear of islamic terrorism.

It isn't just knowledge they lacked, it's our whole economic and technological environment. They lacked knowledge too, though - not just scientific knowledge, but organizational knowledge, what it's like in a world where overt religious mystification is absent from the engines of the economy, little things like how to "court" women when the stakes are 'good sex, emotional connection, and shared experiences' rather than 'rather than 'navigating strong social rails, family and economic interests, and religious duty'.

... of course, I agree that old books have a lot of value, they're not pointless, so I agree with you as much as OP. For everything I mentioned as different, there are many more similarities. But I do think old books are missing a lot that modern writings and people have, core elements of the human condition sure are different today, and your comment seems to overstate the extent to which they're equivalent, or there hasn't been definable progress.

Just to scratch the surface, an understanding of evolution, neuroscience, and atomic theory puts the learned modern person's understanding of human nature leaps and bounds above the ancients. Like, have you read some of the things they believed? It's embarrassing, but obviously they didn't know any better. That's my point. I truly struggle to think of something I'm more baffled by than the seemingly widespread idea that we ought to entertain these ancient people's ideas any more than we'd entertain a toddler's.

Just to scratch the surface, an understanding of evolution, neuroscience, and atomic theory puts the learned modern person's understanding of human nature leaps and bounds above the ancients.

How? What specific insights about human nature do they provide? Additionally, are you familiar with the centuries-long history of "learned modern persons" claiming that science had given them special insight into human nature, and the uniform results of such claims?

Like, have you read some of the things they believed? It's embarrassing, but obviously they didn't know any better.

I have read some of the things they believed. I did not note anything that they should be embarrassed about, nor have I seen any ways that we "know better". Again, the question is not whether we know empirical facts that they did not, but whether those empirical facts tell us things about human nature. Atomic, evolutionary, and neuroscientific theories and facts do not change the realities of any of the elements of human nature I listed in even the smallest way. Death is still death, love is still love, loss is still loss, and so on down the list.

I truly struggle to think of something I'm more baffled by than the seemingly widespread idea that we ought to entertain these ancient people's ideas any more than we'd entertain a toddler's.

Then it should be trivial to describe how our understanding of, say, death or love surpasses theirs. I've never seen someone actually do so, so if you can, please do. Be as specific as possible, if you can.

I have read some of the things they believed. I did not note anything that they should be embarrassed about, nor have I seen any ways that we "know better"

Knowing what we do now, it is kind of embarrassing that people believed curses and premonitions and local spirits were real, right? I'd be very embarrassed if I believed in astrology or faith healing today (many still do, but many fewer serious people do).

Empirical facts about evolution provide us insight into why our minds and bodies are the way they are. They explain our emotions (including love), desires, perceptions, and so on. Everything that makes us what we are is the product of evolution. Atomic theory and neuroscience explain consciousness (although, of course, much mystery remains), personality, and provides good grounds to believe that no soul exists that can persist after death. All of this information informs our understanding of human nature.

Here are a few concrete examples just off the top of my head:

Modern neuroscience allows us to understand (and treat) mental disorders to a significant degree. These would have been mysterious to the ancients. But we understand, to some extent, how things like neurotransmitters affect depression, addiction, anxiety, etc., and that helps us come up with better ways to deal with it and also to sympathize with people who suffer from it.

Our knowledge of the cosmos, limited as it still is, allows us to better understand our place in it (or, perhaps most pertinently, our lack of importance within it).

Likewise, our understanding of evolution rather humbles our perception of our species' place in the world. It also provides insight into human universals such as sexual jealousy, coalitional warfare, the primacy of family, and probably a hundred other such examples. As an example of where a lack of this understanding goes awry, you're probably familiar with the Kibbutz - a feeble attempt by the Israelis to, among other lunacies, raise children communally. Evolutionary insight would immediately reveal the folly of that. But without an understanding of evolution, or at least trial and error, how do you suppose an ancient person would know that this project would be unlikely to succeed? Even if they could figure it out (probably by trial and error!) it seems obvious to me that an evolutionary insight into this aspect of human nature is a superior way to nip that sort of thing in the bud.

Also, even aside from advances in empirical knowledge, we have the advantage of two thousand years of history to draw from. For example, the US founding fathers took ample advantage of the history books to learn from prior empires' mistakes when designing the US system of government. All else being equal, people with more history to draw from will simply be better able to find enduring answers to timeless questions relating to how to organize society (politically, legally, etc.) and minimize common failure modes.

Like, honestly, the case you're making appears tantamount to claiming that superior empirical knowledge and a much longer "civilization bug report log" provides approximately zero advantage in understanding and improving people and society. And if so, like, why do you even bother to learn anything? I honestly don't understand.

Like, honestly, the case you're making appears tantamount to claiming that superior empirical knowledge and a much longer "civilization bug report log" provides approximately zero advantage in understanding and improving people and society.

Yes, that is exactly what I am claiming. I am claiming it because it appears to be straightforwardly, obviously true. The people who codified the general claim you are now repeating did so starting roughly three centuries ago, and they made specific predictions that went along with that claim: that their superior knowledge and understanding would allow them to fundamentally alter the human condition, ending things like ignorance, poverty, crime and war. Their predictions have been thoroughly falsified ever since. We still have ignorance, poverty, crime and war three centuries later, and in about the same amounts. Meanwhile, several branches of the ideological tree those men planted have produced the worst, most concentrated ignorance, poverty, crime and war the world has ever seen.

The truth is that we do not know how to improve people or society better than we did in the past, and in fact we sometimes are worse at it than people in the past were. We know how to make more and better things, how to manipulate the forces of nature better, but we have not made the slightest scratch in poverty, because poverty is and always has been relative. We do not know how to make people happy, or how to make them cooperate and follow the law. Our societies are visibly getting worse, and have been for some time without improvement.

And if so, like, why do you even bother to learn anything? I honestly don't understand.

Because, as the ancients understood, actions still have consequences, and wisdom is better than foolishness. There is a difference between a good life and a bad life, the good life is better, and knowledge and wisdom help greatly in securing it. Beyond that, while the strategy has not changed, the tactics evolve as new technologies are developed, and one must learn them if one is to use them. We have to work, we have to build, we have to band together and cooperate, we have to secure justice, peace and plenty, defend ourselves and build a world for our progeny. The exact details of how we do these things change over time, and the new methods must be mastered. The core nature of these things does not change over time, but it also must be learned, and that learning requires study and hard effort.

Learning things will make our lives better in a number of ways. None of those ways involve any change to the nature of the human condition. Our victories will be sweet, our losses bitter, we will love and hate, build and destroy, grow, age and die.

Empirical facts about evolution provide us insight into why our minds and bodies are the way they are.

I am familiar with many, many claims to this effect. And then I watch rationalists discuss, for an example, ways to get the benefits of religion without the religion, something they've been trying to do for centuries without success. Or I see them claiming to have revolutionized the ordering of sexual relations, or to have developed a superior theory of government, or economics, or political organization, or education, or any of a dozen other things that should logically follow from actual, durable insights into why our minds and bodies are the way they are... And these reliably fail, as they always have and always will. Efforts to operationalize the sort of knowledge you're claiming exists have not been rare, nor lacking in resources or commitment. Some of them fail gracefully. Most of them unleash some form of industrial-scale horror. Take the satanic abuse panic for example, or the destruction of Detroit, for two obvious examples.

Modern neuroscience allows us to understand (and treat) mental disorders to a significant degree.

Modern surgery lets us heal what would have been crippling or lethal injuries, but they have not changed the core nature of what it means to be injured or crippled or killed. Planes have made travel hundreds of times easier, but they have not changed the core nature of travel. Firearms multiply the lethal power of a soldier, but they do not change the core nature of fighting or killing. In the same way, the fact that we can treat some forms of madness does not change the nature of madness itself.

Our knowledge of the cosmos, limited as it still is, allows us to better understand our place in it (or, perhaps most pertinently, our lack of importance within it).

It does not. At the dawn of writing, people fully understood the perspective you're alluding to here, and the additional detail has not added anything fundamental to that understanding. There were believers and atheists in 6000 BC, just as there are now. The purported insignificance of humans is not a novel insight of the modern era, nor a particularly useful one, nor one that is consistently applied. You can claim that we are insignificant, and yet you still hunger for justice and goodness, despite the insight you're claiming providing no basis for such a desire.

Likewise, our understanding of evolution rather humbles our perception of our species' place in the world. It also provides insight into human universals such as sexual jealousy, coalitional warfare, the primacy of family, and probably a hundred other such examples.

Naming is not explaining. The nature of sexual jealousy, coalition warfare, the primacy of family and all the rest of those hundreds of examples were well understood millennia ago. Evolutionary theory can provide an additional narrative purporting to explain such mechanisms, but I see no evidence that it explains or predicts them better than the explanations from previous millennia. That is to say, we cannot interact with any of these elements of human nature and the human experience better than our predecessors.

As an example of where a lack of this understanding goes awry, you're probably familiar with the Kibbutz - a feeble attempt by the Israelis to, among other lunacies, raise children communally.

I am quite confident that the Kibbutzim believed that they were, in fact, basing their policies on the soundest possible principles scientific materialism could provide, among them their peerless command of evolutionary theory. Their mistake was obvious neither to them nor to their contemporaries; it is obvious to you only in hindsight. Likewise, the "science" of transgenderism is "obvious" to an apparent majority of American rational materialists now, despite the obvious pants-on-head insanity of the entire project. In another five decades, doubtless your grandkid will be telling my grandkid how a proper understanding of evolution would have made such mistakes impossible.

Also, even aside from advances in empirical knowledge, we have the advantage of two thousand years of history to draw from.

The knowledge available to us is bounded, so additional millennia of records do not help. The history that we have over those additional thousands of years confirms in excruciating detail that humans do not change, and neither do the problems that we face. The basic nature of our existence is immutable, and does not vary between vastly different times and places. From the ancient Hittites to modern New Yorkers, humans will inevitably human.

This shouldn't even be surprising. We each have a mind, scientific materialist claims to the contrary notwithstanding, and those minds are fundamentally closed to each other, scientific materialist claims to the contrary again notwithstanding. The human lifespan is limited. The ability to learn is sharply constrained, as is the ability to communicate what has been learned. And even when the data is available, the core of the problem, the nature and inclinations of one's own Will, is (thankfully!) not one amenable to engineered solutions.

For example, the US founding fathers took ample advantage of the history books to learn from prior empires' mistakes when designing the US system of government.

The success of the US does not appear to derive from its system of government, but rather from the virtues of its founding population and the unusually fortunate position that population found itself in. As virtues and relative fortune fade, the system observably collapses. A virtuous people and an absurd, absolutely unprecedented abundance of land and natural resources can make nearly any system work well. As it is, America does not look to be on track to outperform far less sophisticated systems such as imperial Rome in the long run.

In the same way, the fact that we can treat some forms of madness does not change the nature of madness itself.

Hell I'd argue they were better at treating madness back then. Seeing it as a demon and casting it out probably works better than the bullshit psychiatrists get up to.

God damnit man, you are SO BASED! Can you write a book on this topic please? I would read every word.

We still have ignorance, poverty, crime and war three centuries later, and in about the same amounts.

It's one thing to make arguments that the enlightenment doesn't deserve any credit for the industrial revolution, but this is straightforwardly false. We have vastly less of all of those things per capita.

It appears to me that if you want to state philosophy ran its course at Ancient Greeks, and specifically at Ancient Greeks, the burden of proof is on you and not on someone who assumes the contrary - that since then, someone wrote better things, or even the same things but better.

I would be happy to assume the burden of proof, though I confess I'm not sure how exactly proving my point is supposed to work. Is it enough to simply take the above and recast it as assertive rather than interrogatory? Otherwise, how am I supposed to prove a negative?

I am aware of no way in which the core elements of the human experience have changed at any point since the invention of writing. The themes contained in the Epic of Gilgamesh remain perfectly salient to the modern human experience.

I am aware of no empirical knowledge acquired since the invention of writing that has provided novel answers to the basic questions of human existence.

I am aware of no progress in human thought since the invention of writing. It does not seem plausible to me that such progress exists, or even that "progress" in this sense is conceptually coherent.

I think that assertions to the contrary are artifacts of deeply irrational social consensus, and dissolve if subjected to even a cursory examination.

Obsolescence should not be a mystery. I know exactly why black-powder muskets are obsolete: they're relatively inaccurate, weak, unreliable, delicate, and slow to reload relative to a modern autoloading cartridge firearm. Detailing further specifics of their obsolescence and even edge-cases where they retain value is a trivial exercise. If the ancient philosophy of the Greeks is similarly obsolete, it should be similarly easy to lay out how and why. Oddly, no one ever does so when such obsolescence is asserted.

I am aware of no empirical knowledge acquired since the invention of writing that has provided novel answers to the basic questions of human existence.

Come on dude, this is straightforwardly false.

The hierarchy of physical explanation that takes us from the mathematics, the standard model, and general relativity all the way to biology, evolution, and the history of the universe provides a compelling mechanistic explanation for most of the human experience in a way that was entirely absent before writing. You can trace most anything all the way back to the laws of physics and observed history if you try hard enough. An ancient man might wonder - why do foxes have fur? God's will - sure is mysterious, right? A smart modern says: Because foxes are mammals, meaning the genera descend from a population that diverged from other mammals sometime in the past, keeping most of their characteristics, one of which is body hair to (among other things) regulate temperature, which evolved by a long series of random mutation (including things like duplication, not just point mutations) in an ancestor of mammals that reused an existing protein (keratin) and extruded it in filaments from specialized organs, hair follicles, in skin.

This can provide strong partial answers to a ton of fundamental questions. Why, physically, are we here? What was here before us? Why is there war? Why is there suffering?

I am aware of no progress in human thought since the invention of writing. It does not seem plausible to me that such progress exists, or even that "progress" in this sense is conceptually coherent.

I think that assertions to the contrary are artifacts of deeply irrational social consensus, and dissolve if subjected to even a cursory examination.

Please write a book. I'm begging you.

I'm not sure I follow your point about Great Books like Aristotle. It's always seemed so obvious to me that these books are rather pointless except as a historical interest. The people who wrote them were so primitive by comparison, so limited in their empirical knowledge, so deprived of the progress in thought that we've made as a species, I can't fathom why someone would think that they have anything interesting to say on its own merits

This is hilariously myopic to me. The point is that there are fundamental axioms of our history and the ideas of our society that were built on Aristotle's points. Your pithy dismissal of 'historic interest' is doing a ton of work here. If you don't want to truly understand anything, then sure throw out all of history while 'learning.' But as @Fruck explained quite well, everything is contextual.

On top of that, modern knowledge is far overrated. The thing the ancients knew much better than we know is people. How we operated, what made us tick, how to live a good life. The question is barely even asked in modern times, because of the massive hubris and casual disdain you express here.

I'm not triggered by him not reading Aristotle, I'm triggered by his apparent faith in the scientific method coupled with his complete disregard for it. But there was obvious value to reading the classics, it imparted a shared language that was linked by a chain to artists and poets and writers going back centuries, birthing the egregore that resides at the foundation of the edifice of Western civilisation. There's almost always a better way to say something, and there isn't a generation that passes without someone writing a better take on the ideas of one or more of the great books. But you can always go back to the classics, and that's immensely valuable. If everything falls apart tomorrow you will always know you can find Plato, Herodotus, Shakespeare and Bacon and Milton somewhere nearby. Probably check retirement homes these days though. TLDR I'm not saying read the classics, I'm saying if you want to be a serious person who does things right and follows the scientific method, then you absolutely should read the original source, and if that happens to be a classic, then read the classic.

Ideally, one would like to think that if someone is quoting SBF and calling him a great moral leader they would be doing so ironically and would dismiss his foolishness.

Extremely confident that Hanania was being sarcastic.

The whole article is sarcastic from start to finish? Or he was being sarcastic about sbf being a great moral leader? Because if the whole article isn't satire then he is not reading him ironically, he is being ironic about reading him sincerely.

I think Hanania was being sarcastic about SBF being a great moral leader, but agreed with him on that specific point.

Exactly. He is not quoting him ironically, nor dismissing his quoted foolishness. He is making a joke, saying "see I know everyone thinks sbf is a dummy, but I think he was right about this." Like when a homophobe says "Bums to the walls chaps!" - he knows its ridiculous to be worried about being jumped and raped by random gay guys, but he is regardless, so he makes a joke of it.

Sorry, I thought this part was obvious, so I used it to mock Hanania's writing style instead of explaining what I meant more thoroughly.

Do you have any examples of writing that actually follows the DRY (Don't Repeat Yourself) principle?

The Neufert. It's not exactly prose, but every symbol on every page is there to convey some additional information.

I disagree with Hanania, and the DRY principle here. Learning information is difficult, and incorporating it into your thought even moreso. Especially in such an information saturated world.

Having multiple examples and dense information in books is a feature. Humans can't just read something once and automatically grasp it. We need to hear ideas multiple times in different ways to understand.

On top of this, information which is distributed by fallible humans needs to be justified as true. Putting 100% faith in and changing your entire worldview after every supposed fact you read in any book from any person is a terrible idea and will quickly lead to contradictions. A book with plenty of examples has an opportunity to not just tell you what it thinks is true, but demonstrate the evidence so you know whether to believe it or not, and to what extent.

Yeah, I'm with you on this. Multiple examples helps the reader triangulate around the idea the author is trying to convey, and it provides redundancy (in the engineer's sense) in case one or two examples fails to click with a reader for idiosyncratic reasons.

There have been a few books I've read that I got almost nothing out of because some core idea, premise, or explanation within it just didn't make sense to me and I couldn't follow the author's reasoning from there on out. If they had only belabored their point with another couple more examples and "to put it another way . . .", it might have salvaged it for me.

I've also realized that the DRY principle is a great thing for writing code but terrible for conversation. If you only say what needs to be said, then you come off as "dry". I suppose 1 more reason added to the "conversation isn't about exchanging ideas or information" bin.

When engaged in pleasantries, I have tried to make it a habit to always say two things. For example:

"Hello."

Wait for response.

"Nice to see you again."

"Goodbye."

Wait for response.

"See you around."

"Thank you."

Wait for response.

"Have a nice day."

I know this sounds incredibly autistic, but I used to just say one thing, without following it up by saying a second thing. I've only recently made it a habit to queue up multiple pleasantries in my head so I can rattle them off in sequence.

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