I appreciate the spirit of this essay, but I think it overstates the idea that intellectual pursuits are an escape from modern dissatisfaction. I've spent most of my life driven by curiosity, forming my identity around being someone who seeks knowledge. But over time I’ve come to see how that, too, can become a kind of consumerism—chasing ideas for the dopamine hit of a new insight, then feeling the letdown and scrambling for the next one.
The essay frames an intellectually rich life as a kind of antidote to consumer culture, but for me it often mirrors the same patterns: FOMO, compulsiveness, neglect of relationships, a deep anxiety that I’ll never learn enough. The awareness that I’ll only ever scratch the surface of all there is to know has become a source of existential stress, not peace.
This isn’t to say intellectual life isn’t meaningful—but it's not a cure-all. It can be just as prone to distortion as anything else if pursued as a form of escape.
I appreciate this perspective as it matches mine and I think comes from experience. I imagine myself sitting on my peak and seeing millions, maybe billions, of other peaks and the desire to traverse them propels me forward. However, as soon as I'm a quarter of the way up one, I start to think, what am I missing on the other peaks? That's the FOMO. Then I spend the next five years of my life partially breaching a thousand ideas and never experiencing satisfaction.
For my part, one of the most striking things which I recall from my youth was reading Dumas' _The Count of Monte Cristo_ and the Abbé Faria contending that everything a gentleman needed to make his way in life was contained in less than 100 books --- which he had memorized the content of, and could impart to the young Edmond Dantes.
A naïve younger me tried to brute force this by reading one non-fiction book from each major section of the Dewey Decimal system catalog, but was stymied by the paucity of a high school library in a county in the second smallest tax base in the state....
Since then, I've actually been trying to put that list together (and lightly updating it for availability from Project Gutenberg/Librivox).
I am about a quarter of the way through Modern Library’s top 100 and it has been a worthwhile journey. It is “just” literary fiction but it is among the best humanity has produced. I have learned so much about the human condition, my ability to articulate ideas has improved tremendously, and I feel like my mind has been “freed from the tyranny of the present” (to quote Cicero).
Anyone who puts "Ulysses" at the top of a best books list is suffering from expertitis. Ulysses has a massive user experience problem. It's hard. Dense, convoluted, absurd. If your friend asks you for a good book, you don't recommend it. The only time you do is when your college English major, or advanced highschooler, who is bored with the tropes of even very good novels wants to stretch themselves. Then you hand them this book.
Why are you conflating "best" with "what you would recommend a friend"?
Many of the best things in life are hard. And you wouldn't necessarily recommend them to a friend.
When you consider specific domains, often the best instances of X tend to be harder versions of X. Or, when people become familiar with many instances of X they seek out the "best" instances of X. Its natural that those best instances would be difficult for people unfamiliar with the domain.
>Or, when people become familiar with many instances of X they seek out the "best" instances of X
I think you're saying the same thing as the GP? Ulysses is a book for lit nerds, which I suppose the Modern Library board were.
Looking at the list, there's hardly any books from after mid 20th century. That makes me think that the board comprised primarily old lit nerds, who stopped reading long before voting. The list is also super ethno centric, which makes me more dubious still about the claims for "best" anything.
According to the NYT[1], between 1950 and 2018 95% of published English-language fiction authors were white. That Top 100 Novel list contains at least 3 black authors, Ellison, Wright, and Baldwin. Considering that the percentage of black authors for the period 1900-2000 was probably even less than for 1950-2000, and that there are actually only 75 unique authors in that list, on its face I don't see the bias by the voters. The bias is in the disproportionate share of published white authors.
Yes, this list reads like one a Midwestern high schooler would go through to impress his failed literature teacher, who will write him a nice recommendation letter for the ultra-conformist university of his dreams, dooming him to 25 years of debt and a miserable life working as a consultant
Expertitis is not a thing and your criticism is based merely on public perception of the book and not the book itself. In case it wasn’t clear, I disagree completely: Ulysses is very worthy of the honor. It is as approachable as it is lofty.
I agree, and in fact I did not start with Ulysses and do not recommend people do. I read 2-10 on the list, then Hamlet, then Ulysses - which I feel mostly prepared me for it. I did love it, but it is not an easy read, and took me the better part of a month to get through.
I've gotten the same feeling watching old movies a second time.
I would watch a movie when I was young, and it just came out. It would be "modern", maybe state of the art, and it would have an impact on me. But I was young, and easily impressed by the cliche or trite.
And then I would watch the same movie decades later. Times changed, the art has changed, casting, pacing, effects have all advanced to support the storytelling. And I am older, a different person, and maybe more aware of what is "timeless" with a little more experience under my belt.
It might be a historical deep dive, but compared to the available material our present has, some older media should drop off the list.
I've read more than half of those, and every time I see that list, I really wish that almost every book would be paired w/ one which enhances/comments on either the book or that same theme.
e.g., _Kim_ by Rudyard Kipling should be paired w/ Robert Heinlein's _Citizen of the Galaxy_, or _The Grapes of Wrath_, which was cribbed from Sanora Babb's notes w/o permission should be paired w/ her _Whose Names Are Unknown_:
I’m not a literary scholar, but this seems like a great use case for ChatGPT. I’ve used it for music explorations and found it surprisingly good at providing context and interesting suggestions. I tried your idea with The Grapes of Wrath and it surfaced Whose Names Are Unknown, with a thoughtful explanation. Obviously it’s qualitative, but you can shape the prompt to reflect your taste and still get some worthwhile discoveries.
I don't think this is a very good list that should call itself top 100. Maybe anglophone top 100, but even then I'd question some of the choices. I completely ignores a ton of more important works in non-English languages.
The full quote is allegedly "The purpose of education is to free the student from the tyranny of the present." ...I picked it up in Neil Postman's Amusing Ourselves to Death, but he didn't cite which work it came from. Goodreads attributes it to "Selected Works".
That's a dreadful list in my opinion. Absurdly Anglocentric (esp. Americo-centric). I'm not saying they're bad books but a really far cry from "among the best humanity has produced". Not a single south-american novel? Not a single romance language book as a matter of fact? I highly recommend you diversify your reading choices.
would have loved to see some non native English speaking authors on the list. (instead of listing some authors twice - as great as they are). There were 2 Russians that stood out but no Camus, Feuchtwanger, Remarque, Musil, Borges, ...
Yes, it's kind of a strange slice - we get Faulkner three times and we get Joseph Conrad no fewer than four times(!), but not a single book from Dostoevsky or Tolstoy? No Bulgakov, no Turgenev? No Flaubert?
Lermontov's 'Hero of Our Time' is probably my favorite Russian novel, and I say that as someone who absolutely adores Dostoevsky. It still feels relevant and modern.
This list is kind of strange. Firstly, it is very "anglo-saxon" oriented. It is a mixture of "Big Literature", interesting for someone who is literature student, like ULYSSES (which is at the same time a great novel and a boring as hell novel) with true gems, like Orwell or Joseph Conrad-Korzeniowski with additions like Robert Graves writing, which has mostly entertainment value equal to average pseudo-documentaries from Netflix and pop stuff like Vonnegut' books (which are, at least, not boring).
Still, a lot of interesting stuff, Orwell, unfortunately, never gets old, pity
Ray Bradbury was omitted, as Fahrenheit 451 is getting more and more up-to-date.
And I say that as a Modern Literature major who has read a lot on that list. FAULKNER IS A TERRIBLE WRITER! And while James Joyce and some of the others are good writers, they don't deserve multiple entries in the top 100.
It's clear this list is really "5 librarians personal favorites."
The Sound and the Fury is an incredible piece of art with a beautifully structured narrative, in my reading of it. Why do you say he's a terrible writer in your opinion? Who would you rank higher?
It was from a list of 440 books (possibly what Random House then had in stock) and voted on by the board members --- it's been widely criticized/commented on, see the Wikipedia article for some further links on this.
"Be careful… about this reading you refer to, this reading of many different authors and books of every description. You should be extending your stay among writers whose genius is unquestionable, deriving constant nourishment from them if you wish to gain anything from your reading that will find a lasting place in your mind."
- Seneca, Letters
I was surprised to learn that the temptation to read too many things was also a problem 2,000 years ago. This inspired me to work on a short list of books that I know deeply.
Sucks that the vast majority of those books were lost forever. Early Christianity was a scourge in that regard, how much culture we lost forever because of those zealots.
I didn't realize Early Christianity had a monopoly on the destruction of books? As far as I know the burning of rival civilizations has been happening for thousands of years.
I would say that material decay, neglect, economic collapse, war, and changing cultural priorities played a far greater role in the loss of these texts rather than the ones lost to zealous Christians. It's just weird to single that group out when their actions represent a minority in the overall loss of these ancient texts.
St John's College is known for their Great Books curriculum - the foundation of their four year program - where students read the primary text of western civilization.
It's always held a soft spot in my heart as my own experience was mostly reading derivative descriptions and the rare times when I was able to read a primary text during my coursework were always my happiest memories.
Trying to learn Newtonian Mechanics from Philosophiæ Naturalis Principia Mathematica is kinda dumb though.
I certainly noticed that it was ineffective in discussing implications with the students. I found Boyle's observations far more effective in teaching science.
I had an elective class at St. John's where we read selections from Newton's Principia (ISBN 9781888009262) together with William Blake's long poem "Jerusalem, the Emanation of the Giant Albion".
The goal was not to learn how to do physics calculations, but to understand each writer's concept of reality and humanity's relationship to it. I remember that Blake really focused on the worth of actually instantiated reality, what he called "minute particulars", in contrast to Newton's abstractions:
He who would do good to another, must do it in Minute Particulars
General Good is the plea of the scoundrel hypocrite & flatterer:
For Art & Science cannot exist but in minutely organized Particulars
And not in generalizing Demonstrations of the Rational Power.
Also, Newton's Principia uses Euclidian-style demonstrations to illustrate many of his points, whereas today we would use algebraic calculus. That was fun, since everyone in the room had also worked through the first book of Euclid's Elements.
Similarly, a related project is an effort to assemble a chronological list of books where the oldest text which is still valid given contemporary knowledge of the subject is listed includes Euclid's _Elements_ of course:
One issue I have with modern teaching of both Math and Physics though is that they give the "correct" answer to fast which teaches the material and accelerates learning but I think it also leaves a lot of motivations for why certain decisions were come to and how which is important.
Recently I've been following long with the Distance Ladder challenge I saw on 3 blue 1 brown with Terence Tao. Going through those question is motivating because those questions are based in solving navigational problems. I fear that with the ever increasing the low friction in life we are stealing the challenge and things for people to consider to build up there problem solving ability before the curtain is pulled.
I think its also more motivating to learn considering more interesting questions especially in math. All this to say going back to the source material while not the most modern accurate physics it usually does include large amounts of motivation to explain why things are logical and what they are doing it for. To be fair I haven't read the Philosophiae Naturalis Principia but I have read other old book and wager it has similarities
Hmm but you can (an in fact do, in many physics programs) follow the historical development of theories using modern textbooks. The pedagogical value is in understanding, not exactly in wading through the archaic language and the confused early papers.
Even for modern theories like general relativity people study by textbooks written many decades after the fact, with a clear picture after things were settled, and not by Einstein's first papers :)
> Trying to learn Newtonian Mechanics from Philosophiæ Naturalis Principia Mathematica is kinda dumb though.
It'd be like wanting to improve your cardio health so you try to climb K2. The edition I have has 150+ pages of just introduction. You have to wade through all of that just to be able to figure out how to read the rest of the tome. It is cool, though!
Let’s be honest, trying to learn Newtonian mechanics by majoring in the humanities probably isn’t the best approach. Maybe that’s not really what the program is meant for in the first place.
A co-worker mentioned this school when his son selected it for a visit, and I quite envy the young man the chance to attend --- I believe I got everything from their reading list --- if I missed something, let me know.
They have a graduate program available at a distance if you feel particularly drawn to their learning style. Basically covers a subset of the UG curriculum.
Yeah, I considered that --- just not an option financially --- my workplace is actually next door to a private university, and I've been considering getting a Masters in CS there, then going on to get a PhD....
Based on your interest in Tacitus and Thucydides, I might recommend the The Histories of Polybius. [1] It is absolutely mind-blowing to me that he actually witnessed the events he writes about, and how analogous it is to modern-day geopolitics.
By the way, thank you for providing your list of books - I picked up a few future reads from it.
I actually did your Dewey Decimal project: https://www.dahosek.com/category/dewey-decimal-project/ I read one book out of each “decade” of the Dewey catalog from my local library (which is reasonably well stocked). It was a bit less than the predicted 100 books since there are some gaps in both the system and the collection of my library, but it was an interesting way to discover things I didn’t know I didn’t know.
The most important books are things like first aid and CPR. Or better yet a class because hands on experience beat books learning.
I love the Gingery books and they are great foundations for a hobby. However even in a end of civilization scenario we only need a small minority who knows that content who can teach the rest - that is at best, but quite likely there won't be enough industrial base to produce the aluminum needed and so you are stuck with useless knowledge. Even your 19th century homesteading tends to assume far more industrial base to make some annoyingly hard things.
Most so called practical skills are either not practical in modern civilization (there is far too much population for us all the be hunter/gathers even if we want to); or they are only practical in context of current times. I've seen how to wire your house for electric lights books from the 1920s - most of the things shown wouldn't pass code today. My house was built in 1970, and there are a lot of things that still work but there is good reason we don't allow that anymore.
Had Self-aid and buddy care when I was in the service, and became qualified and volunteered as an EMT for a while after getting out. I do have a Wilderness Survival First Aid Book on my Kindle, and I'll definitely add it to this list.
I actually had a copy of _The Metal Lathe (Build Your Own Metal Working Shop From Scrap, Volume 2)_ ages ago, and slotting in the full leatherbound edition of all 7 volumes is likewise a good fit.
Trying to focus on intellectual things --- practical skills invites the list becoming an extension of my various interests (note the extant shelves on archery and woodworking) and their various intersections, e.g.,
“The Good Life” by Helen and Scott Nearing has an excellent bibliography/citations section.
How to build stone houses, compost and farm organically, etc. A good primer on homesteading. Contains references to things like 19th century homestead manuals
I've considered adding "The Foxfire" books (which I read when I was much younger) and perhaps a text by Roy Underhill, but as noted elsethread, this is intended as an academic/social list.
> reading one non-fiction book from each major section of the Dewey Decimal system catalog
This actually sounds really fun. Not so much in an optimized way, but more like just going to the library and picking a decimal heading and then just selecting a cool-looking book in that heading and reading it, then repeat.
Tried to do it again in college, but using the LoC headings, but ran out of time and graduated before running out of college/headings.
To this day, when going to the library, I try to keep this in mind when looking over the new books, and if there is one on a major/notable subject I can't recall having read a book on, grab it.
I only read great literature, classics, history books my whole life. This year (Aged 48) I decided to pepper in a "fluff" book or two. I forced myself to read something I normally wouldn't. I read "The Situation" (Jersey Shore) and Mathew Perry (Friends) "auto" biographies. I actually had some profound insights about depression and substance abuse from those two. Of course, I don't recommend you read either, but if you never read "airport fiction" or "pop biographies" it might prove interesting.
One of my personal favorites, but a very difficult read: _Summa Technologiae_ by Stanislaw Lem. It's so difficult I haven't actually finished it. It's remarkably dense.
Dumas himself had a personal library of about 6,000 books at its peak. If you don't already have them on your list, historians have mentioned several books that were known to have strongly influenced him:
Walter Scott's historical novels, particularly "Ivanhoe" and "Waverley," which inspired Dumas' approach to historical fiction
James Fenimore Cooper's frontier adventures, which influenced his action narratives
Lord Byron's romantic poetry and persona, which shaped Dumas' conception of the romantic hero
Schiller's play "The Conspiracy of Fiesco at Genoa," which Dumas translated and adapted early in his career
Shakespeare's dramatic works
Memoirs of historical figures, particularly those from the 17th and 18th centuries, including Courtilz de Sandras' "Mémoires de M. d'Artagnan," which became the foundation for "The Three Musketeers"
Plutarch's "Lives," which informed his understanding of classical historical figures
Works by Abbé Prévost and other French novelists of the 18th century
Some books I would put on this list: Knowledge and Decisions by Thomas Sowell, Le Rouge et le Noir by Stendhal, Up From Slavery by Booker T. Washington, 1984 by George Orwell.
"Reappraisals" and "When the Facts Change" should be on top of everyone's reading list. Few indeed are those who can write prose as crisp, succinct and erudite as he did.
I love this idea, and the lost is full of gems, but I see a couple of issues. If you actually intend you or anyone else to read these and stay sane I'd remove the mathematical tables (there is value in reading these, but only for a very rare soul), the Bible (lots of really dry stuff about begetting and knowing), the complete works of Shakespeare (hard to understand without careful study, way too long to cafefully study).
My Shakespeare class in college was based around performing a play at the end of the semester. We read about half a dozen plays, but the bulk of our work was based around preparing to perform Hamlet (each semester, a different play was performed, with fall being Comedies/Histories and Spring being Tragedies/Romances).
The big challenge is that a lot of plays are rarely performed. I had the good fortune of hearing an interview with Kenneth Brannagh where he talked about how Shakespeare is better experienced by watching a performance than reading a text and he made an aside about how it’s unlikely you’re going to get to see Henry IV part II performed and then spotting that there was a free performance of that exact play being given at the Chicago Cultural Center. This turned out to be part of a series of staged readings of all the plays. I missed the beginning of the sequence, but stuck around to the end. One of the coolest moments of this came when I was attending a play at the Goodman Theatre which had the actors interacting with audience members during intermission and one of the actors in the play recognized me from the audience of the staged readings.
> the Bible (lots of really dry stuff about begetting and knowing)
I'd suggest replacing the Bible with just the Gospels (Matthew, Mark, Luke[0], and John). Removing it entirely seems like a mistake since you'd lose a lot of the literary and moral underpinnings of Western culture, but having to read the bible in its entirely sounds exhausting. I did it (reading all four gospels) recently and can attest even outside of the religious aspects the retelling of the same tragic story in four different was is a fascinating literary experience.
[0] Technically we should through Acts in there too since Luke-Acts are essentially one book, but it's not a gospel so I left it out. Plus quite frankly while I did read it I found it way more boring than the others; turns out that Jesus fellow is a way more interesting main character than Paul :)
I think the Bible can mostly be distilled to Genesis, Exodus and the Gospels without losing too much. Each of those books is eminently legible in its own right. You could arguably make the sermon on the mount its own book, “communist manifesto” style.
I think those individual chapters would be super compelling to modern readers with or without a religious background, but their legibility is held back by the rest of the Bible’s contents. How is someone non-religious supposed to figure out that it’s ok to start reading a book at section 2, chapter 1? :)
Isaiah for the poetic language and imagery deeply embedded in Western culture. Psalms for raw expression of the emotions at the heart of the human condition: suffering, rejection, abandonment, joy, and praise.
I'm inclined to agree, except to add that Ecclesiastes stands on its own as a great piece of philosophy, and Revelations is pretty influential as well as having some pretty entertaining madness.
It's argued that God had a plan (all-knowing). The compelling argument to read the Old Testament in full before the New Testament is that this whole thing was a deliberate sequence. That's if you are willing to entertain the notion on a literary level (forget about belief). Take the story of Samson for example, one argument is that God showed that humans would persecute a man whom humanity couldn't even contemplate could have gotten his powers from God. It's a setup for Christ.
You can distill if you are looking for moral teachings, but you can't if you want to know this guys (that guy up in the sky) full plan, in which case you have to entertain that it was a sequence of events. It's very weird, but almost makes going through the whole Bible fascinating as a serial drama. One thing led to another.
I totally agree. I think for theological reasons (if your goal is to convince yourself that Jesus is the Messiah of the Abrahamic religions), then it can’t be distilled.
However, I do think the abrahamic origin stories (genesis), the tribulations of the Jewish people in Egypt and reception of the Ten Commandments (exodus), and the moral teachings of Christ that replace those commandments (gospels) are more or less self-contained and free-standing, if you’re trying to understand them at face value.
The gospels in particular contain a good moral teachings that are arguably more valuable than anything else in the book. Like really clear directives on how to live and carry yourself.
In my Weird Bible, I’d cold open with the sermon on the mount, followed by the Pharisees and the passion, and recursively hyper-link to every New Testament or Old Testament thing that supports those “primary” stories. I feel like if you arranged the Bible into a neat “tree” structure that way, the main load-bearing trunks would be the books mentioned.
I appreciate your points. Morality is what most people want to take away from all of these books, but the thing they want to leave behind is one requirement that God seems to have, and that's straight up obedience. Obedience doesn't really fit inside morality, and in fact if you just distill morality out, obedience won't make it. The Old Testament hammers home the need for obedience to God's laws in story after story, until finally God just kinda lets us know that "hey you guys really cannot follow the law, so lets shift to a relationship framework with Christ". That's how I've been making sense of WHAT the Old Testament is in the context of the sequence, and further, why I don't ignore it because it seems to be he values both morality and obedience (and again, obedience doesn't fit into morality - Just the story of Abraham and his son, there's nothing moral about it).
It's a thoroughly Christian view, that being humans lack the capacity to follow God's laws because we're inherently sinners - but that's a whole nother' can of worms. It's kind of like a Kindergarten teacher (God) letting the kids run the show for a day (Old Testament), just to make it clear, they can't manage it. It's quite a thing to believe such a supreme being would run a sequence like that on us (in fact, that's how I make sense of a lot of the craziness in the world, that God would in fact let things run its course, however messed up (even in modern times, e.g - the narcissistic scale of social media, wars, factory slavery in China, migrant slavery in Mideast construction projects, abject poverty in the third world, pure greed and gluttonous abundance in the west, drug epidemics that rival plagues, etc, where all of these things are just as Biblically fucked up as parts of the Bible)). It's my only case for why the Old Testament is quite relevant to understanding the fullness of God. In short, the desire to understand how and why God would work in this way leads me to consider the entirety of the Bible, beginning to end.
Yes, but the Gospels are "complete." You obviously gain much by reading the OT before it—not to mention the apocrypha like Enoch and Jubilees which are quoted directly and indirectly in the NT—but the Gospels have the entire "message" contained within them.
My mom grew up in Bangladesh with a classic British education (augmented with Russian works that were popular in the country given the socialist alignment). She speaks English with a heavy accent despite living here for almost 40 years, but will randomly reference great works in conversation. The other day she worked a reference to a greek tragedy into a dig at Pakistanis. I’ve come around to the idea that this isn’t merely a class flex, but rather these works have distilled observations about the human condition as well as building blocks of the society we live in even where we don’t recognize the provenance.
Exactly correct. In reading some highly regarded works two things occurred to me, first that the author had captured into words some fundamental aspect of the human condition. Second was that it's easier to think about something presented as a story than it is when it is presented as an alternative to how you currently think.
If you tell someone there position on some topic is wrong, they will argue with you. If you tell someone a story where the character takes the same position they have and then through experience and personal growth comes to understand how it is wrong. They can come away realizing that they might have it wrong. Great trick when it works.
One contemporary author who often writes fantasy and science fiction on social issues is Steven Brust, and he has a rule that when he puts his personal viewpoints into the mouth of a character, he uses a character whom the reader would have a narrative reason to dislike, which forces him to be honest with himself, and more impartial with the reader.
Judging from the French movie (with Pierre Niney) I saw last year (which was awesome btw) , and my vague recollection of the book, there's lots of physical skills involved. It's not just an intellectual pursuit, but more like applied science in getting vengeance. Really fun read.
Big chunk of social media is self improvement. Stumbled across this guy yesterday and actually gives pretty solid advice.
If your wife isn't happy to see you fencing (which I can understand) you might want to take a look at archery instead? And add this book (which impressed me during my teenage years) to your reading list:
> In August 2018, in the last month of my three-month sabbatical, I arrived at the Hamta village in Himachal Pradesh. I rented a one-room cottage, and my caretakers were Dolma Aunty and Kalzang Uncle, a couple well into their 70’s.
I got to this part and realized: I've read this article before in some form.
It's a really common trope to head out to some remote area of Asia and admire how happy people are. There's often a spiritual component to it. I will write the guy a bit of a pass, because he himself is (I think) Indian.
But westerners have been doing stuff like this for ages and prattling on about it - it's kind of a cornerstone of Orientalism. This was actually a plot point in the recent White Lotus season. People rarely go to Appalachia to have these experiences, but you certainly can find people living simple happy lives there. (At least, if they do, nobody publishes those articles - it doesn't fit our preconceived notions of who gets to be enlightened, which is to say it has to be some place far away and people very different than your average Americans)
Not to say there's no value in this article (there is), and it was a fun read at that.
> But westerners have been doing stuff like this for ages and prattling on about it - it's kind of a cornerstone of Orientalism. This was actually a plot point in the recent White Lotus season. People rarely go to Appalachia to have these experiences, but you certainly can find people living simple happy lives there.
I think you're moralizing over a pretty bland bit of psychology: people need to be shaken from their frame of reference to see different parts of the world. Even if they exist next door. For many Americans, Appalachia will be too close to home to force off the blinders.
I've flown all over the US for work, and in every location found the same exact city. It's hard to take away someone's footing when they feel at home. OTOH, the preconditions that gave me many life broadening experiences within 100 miles of a single US city are not available to everyone.
Assigning someone internal character traits so that their external practice of respectful travel can still be judged is cruel.
> I've flown all over the US for work, and in every location found the same exact city.
I think you can find the exact same city if you like but I also have found much more. Simply LA and NY are very different places, as are different communities in those cities.
Agreed. I think beyond tourist voyeurism, there is something really maturing(?) about being inserted into a completely different culture where people seem to be content. I grew up in rural Wisconsin and even the micro-change of moving away for college in a place like St. Louis had very important implications for my worldview.
As someone from the US who's traveled all over the country for fun, I can assure you there are loads of delightfully unique places and rich communities that think and act quite differently from each other.
But yes I could see how work travel only could make them feel like carbon copies - both from the mindset you'd be in and from the types of places you might only go for work.
Places you go for work are mostly corporate parks in the suburbs. Of course they all feel the same. I had the same experience and that was why - rarely did I get to visit the big cities. I went to places which had Chili's and Target and Outback Steakhouse.
On the odd times I visited DC or SF or Toronto - really amazing and different experiences.
Both the DC and SF metro areas have Chili's, Target, and Outback. Can you articulate what made DC and SF "really amazing and different experiences" from one another, beyond vibes? Asking as an American who's pretty sure it's all the same here (and has traveled internationally to places where it's not).
You can get just about any kind of food - because just about every culture in the world is represented. You can find some of the more home-y type menu options too for the same reason. For example, Greek restaurants where I am at don't generally have Taramosalata (carp roe dip). Due to the shorter flights to Africa, the is a much larger African population in the DC area. One trip, I bought some Nigerian movies at a gas station. Then there's all the historical stuff - tomb of the unknown soldier, Vietnam wall, Air & Space Museum, etc. As I wandered around town on one of my early trips there, I keep seeing things I thought were very familiar - and it turns out at least some were because Bethesda (HQ'd nearby) had done an awesome job recreating apocalypse versions of them in Fallout 3 (which I played a lot of).
SF:
I went cycling a few times with a friend of mine. We went over the Golden Gate bridge, which was amazing. Also to the top of some mountain (big hill?) overlooking the city. What a view! I like to fish, and dropped a line near my hotel and caught a leopard shark. I saw an old Japanese homeless man wheel a little red wagon on a pier near the Mozilla HQ (near the many-billion dollar company I was visiting), and catch a pile of Jacksmelt using a spark plug as a sinker. There is a lot of excellent Asian-influenced dining options - my personal favorite is Lilo Lilo Yacht Club. I got to see a tent city of what appeared to be techies - all really nice huge family-sized tents, well dressed and apparently happy and well fed. One time, I was having a drink in a bar in SFO, and chatted up a guy who had just come from an executive meeting with a bunch of VP's and CTO's of Sony, where chewed them out about their usage of Kubernetes. I saw a shirtless man walking around with what appeared to be pony boots? I assume part of the gay scene.
Now - you may not like all that, but you are not generally having those experiences near suburban corporate parks. Yes, they have Outback Steakhouses, but they have rather a lot more going on.
Hmm, thanks for going into detail. My point wasn't so much that you can experience everything a city has to offer in a corporate park. It was more that most US cities offer roughly the same things.
I know I can get Greek and Asian food in both St. Louis and Denver. I just confirmed that both cities have Greek places with Taramosalata; I know from dating a Chinese girl for a year that both of those cities have extremely authentic Asian places. I've seen gay men walking around in at least Denver and Calgary (not even US).
Now, being able to browse and buy a Nigerian movie at a gas station instead of needing to get it online is something that might qualify if it's truly exclusive to DC. The techie "tent city" in California is probably unique to California, you've got me on that one.
Having visited plenty of U.S. history/military/science/etc museums across several midwestern/western states, those could probably be argued either way. On one hand, of course every museum will have different artifacts/exhibits/etc that mean it's not quite the same at every one, and there are individual facts that you could learn at one but not another. On the other hand, I think the likelihood of coming across something in a US museum that noticeably expands my human experience is lower than the likelihood of that happening in another continent's museums.
Well if it is the unique things, there is still many unique things in the big cities. If you are discounting the vibe, I guess I understand why you are disappointed. The vibe is a big part of what makes big cities feel so distinctive.
If you think DC is samey, maybe your expectations around uniqueness are higher than your average person's. Lol. I have not gone out drinking (much) there, but I would wager it would not take long to end up with insane stories about people you read about in the news.
There are actually no Chili's or Outback or Applebee's or most national chains you can think of in San Francisco. You said "metro area", I have no idea what this means in this context given most people like the city itself, not the sprawling strip mall towns on the peninsula which is not San Francisco. The city limits are pretty well defined here.
Rather reminds me of Pratchetts character Lu-Tze, who having seen so many travel to the monasteries to achieve enlightenment decides to travel to Ankh Morpork and learns many ancient wisdoms ('Is it not written "Oo, you are so sharp you'll cut yourself one of these days."?')
Dr. Ambedkar is somebody more people in the United States should know about. I was a briefly involved with the Triratna Buddhist Community and read some of Sangharakshita's writing, and he discusses Ambedkar. Real interesting stuff.
TBH Dr. Ambedkar’s Buddhism is very different from what the other traditions preach. It was an answer to the prevailing jātivada, but unfortunately it didn’t manage to make the dent he envisioned.
I’ve grown up around Navayana and have many friends from Kagyu, Theravada and other traditions.
(All this to say I know Bauddha Dharma intimately)
All part of the great warp and weft. It's a fascinating thing to learn about, how all these traditions intersect.
Seattle, the city I live in, recently became the first to ban caste discrimination. I didn't think much of it at the time, but nowadays maybe there's something to be learned from jātivada, the many forms it comes in, and the response to it. Reading Leslie Feinberg right now, interesting working class perspective.
There’s a difference between casteism and jātivada which is not easy to explain in a short comment. Ambedkar’s “ Annihilation of Caste” and A.M. Hocart’s works provide interesting insight on it.
Hamta isn't even really rural. It's a bunch of homestays just outside of Manali, and is similar to Pahalgam.
My family is from rural HP/JK/Ladakh, and a homestay like Hamta is not representative of rural HP/JK/LA/UK.
> They’re enamoured by the simple and rustic living of the villages and think of them as noble savages
I think it goes both ways. They either over-idealize it, or overly berate it.
I feel it's also state dependent to a certain extent, with some states better at rural administrative capacity (eg. Kerala, HP, PB, JK) than others (eg. KA, TG, GJ).
Something I've noticed is states that don't have a primary city tend to have slightly better rural administrative capacity, as it at least incentivizes small town or T3/4 economies to develop instead of being invested in a single mega city.
Thanks for adding extra context. I wasn’t aware of Hamta. My experience is in rural central and South India but I’ve travelled extensively in Garhwal. How different would you say rural JK/HP/LA/UK is?
Your last para rings true. Goa, Kerala, CG and Odisha have better rural administration than MH, TL or KA because of the absence of heavyweight cities.
> How different would you say rural JK/HP/LA/UK is?
Rural UK is much poorer than rural HP and JK.
The administrative structure of UK is very top heavy (everything is decided in Dehradun), and Dehradun+Haridwar have caused tourism and real estate induced Dutch Disease to arise. JK and HP also have a tourism economy, but also have a strong industrial base (pharma in HP, heavy industry in JK) plus more investment in higher value rural industries like food processing and fruit cultivation.
HP and JK also have a bottom up political culture with panchayats in a district coalescing into District Planning Committee that includes state civil service cadre and the MLA, so local governance is much more responsive, and has the resources and capacity to invest in infra like cold storage or make the case for an MNC to invest in manufacturing.
Basically, if local government and administration is actually given priority beyond haphazard panchayats, it makes it easier to attract build industries and a semi-industrial rural economy.
> Kerala, CG and Odisha have better rural administration than MH, TL or KA because of the absence of heavyweight cities.
Political culture is also more top-down in states like MH/TG/KA, where the CM office tends to have inordinate control over local planning and panchayat+local government funding is minimal
Even if their administrations had some interest in rural economic development (which in those states they don't), they wouldn't even have the bandwidth because there are too many districts. This is why local government needs to be invested in by states, but locals are the ones who know best about their needs and capabilities.
Great comment, thank you for sharing it. I’ve seen some of it in Garhwal where villages didn’t get proper attention by the Govt. We keep forgetting that states in India are akin to states in Europe.
A modern version of Gram Swaraj combined with Switzerland type canton system might work well but there are no incentives for the administration for that.
I'm not sure a canton type system is necessary if the Gram Swaraj system sees further investment and is coupled with delimitation for legislative assemblies, it would solve most of the pressing problems.
A lopsided population to MLA ratio makes it easier for MLAs to be disconnected from local government, and incentivizes governance through internal party machinery (beg the CM or the local party leadership to get your MLA or DM to do something) instead of via the local administration, which further deprofessionalizes local government.
> We keep forgetting that states in India are akin to states in Europe.
Pretty much. Even within states the diversity is insane (eg. MP, KA, or UP would be better served split into 3-4 states).
I think that as tropey as such a practice is, there's a fundamental valid reason to do trips of this sort. You want to meet people as culturally remote and distant from you as you think exist, that you are still theoretically comfortable with. Then you want to be assured or refuted directly through your direct senses on things that you think are fundamental to the human condition. From such an experience you gain confidence on what you think is important to life and living.
I agree that this is a common trope but the rest of your comment reads like, "Hey westerners, go find your own rural people and stop appropriating mine".
Also completing your logic loop, this guy is apparently stealing intellectual ideas from (mediocre) westerners.
If you go to another place and someone lets you stay with them, they are probably in a good place in life. You are selecting yourself to meet with happier people.
You won’t be making as many friends with unhappy people.
Well, maybe there's something to it. I think it's great when East meets West. East should keep meeting West over and over and over. Maybe one day East will know West and vice versa.
For what it's worth, I had something of a similar experience, but it was in a plywood shack on a desert island off the coast of California.
A simpler explanation is that Americans have succumbed to consumerism to such an extent that the absence of it feels enlightened.
Of course the reality is just that the US has become the axis of evil, and perhaps always was, it just had the best PR.
I think you're doing yourself a disservice by belitting Asian cultures and what insights they may have, that are apparently incomprehensible as more than a trope to Americans.
> Of course the reality is just that the US has become the axis of evil, and perhaps always was, it just had the best PR.
Sigh.
Yes, the Soviet Union really was the worker's paradise with free, prosperous, happy people!
Can we get away from the sophomoric idea the USA was ALWAYS the ONLY source of badness in the world, just because right now it's the most powerful nation in the world and also a complete mess?
I suspect that the communist project has lived under constant fear of the US, that the economy ultimately was bankrupted from having to defend itself against the US war machine.
The US has waged war in virtually every country around the world, for example Afghanistan, Vietnam, and Korea, which were significant threats to both Soviet and China. China has virtually been besieged since the 1950s, with Americans present in Thailand, Philippines, Japan, Taiwan, and South Korea.
How would you feel if the Soviet installed weapons systems in Canada, Hawaii, Mexico, Greenland, and Cuba? And then started a tariff war to hopefully bankrupt your economy?
Wasn't communism influenced heavily by being anti-capitalist? They fundamentally disagreed with the tenants that the United States stood on. Your comment, if I'm understanding it correctly, makes it look like the communists were just trying to do their own thing in their own countries and the big bad U.S came in and bullied them out of existence.
I'm not defending either sides here. I'm not a Reaganot. But to think most communist regimes were not hellbent on the destruction of western capitalism would seem a bit misleading to me.
That is fair; I think the reality is nuanced and that different opinions existed at the same time and were warring internally in the Soviet Union.
In particular, IIUC, Trotsky thought that "a socialist revolution must spread internationally to succeed and cannot be confined to one nation" (OpenAI) - but he was also assassinated by Stalin's order, and the assassin was honored by Brezhnev. Stalin was assassinated as well.
It's a great tragedy if they felt threatened by capitalism, and capitalism by communism, in a self-perpetuating way that could have been avoided.
But I would argue that capitalism has its roots in aristocracy, imperialism, and private ownership (i.e. slavery, colonialism, and systemic exploitation), to an extent that it is fair to say that capitalism cannot co-exist with communist ideals.
But yes, European countries were heavily influenced by communist ideology, which continues to shape our values today, about well-regulated free markets, fair taxation, public service, and so on, which directly threatened capitalist interests, and arguably that's why we're seeing a rise in fascism, in an attempt to remove these communist ideals.
To be clear, I am confused on this matter, but I do think that the Europeans have been foolish to follow US doctrine for the last 50 years (since Reagan/Thatcher), and especially the last 10-20 years have been devastating on virtually every sector of the economy.
> But yes, European countries were heavily influenced by communist ideology, which continues to shape our values today, about well-regulated free markets, fair taxation, public service, and so on
So this is the first time I've seen well-regulated free markets and fair taxation as being associated with communist ideology. Granted, I'm not well-studied here, but I recall being taught quite the opposite.
I did some preliminary research uisng Gemini Research to see if I could surface anything that might suggest this has been universally regarded as true and it came back with the opposite on the first (well-regulated free markets) and ambiguity on the second (not universally associated with communism).
Would you be able to reference a place where I can learn more about these relationships?
America is the best because citizens can do basically whatever they want all the time. The latest complaints are people took it too far (rampant drug use, camping on sidewalks, and shitting everywhere in San Francisco, etc.).
But if you want to buy a rural cabin on a beautiful mountain, it’s available, and cheap. You don’t need to go to Asia to live like a hermit.
Obviously America refers to the continent, so I'll use the shorthand country name "the US" instead.
> is the best
That may be true, but I do wonder if it was a lucky accident. What if the Irish famine hadn't happened? What if WW2 had been averted (but maybe the EU wouldn't exist...).
> rural cabin
That's nice, but what value is it if the forest burns down, the lake is polluted, the wild life is dead, and there's nothing left but neighboring land full of fracking wells? Glory to god.
Ehh US farmland usage has been dropping for many decades. That said, it is only because we are more than ever reliant upon fossil fuel derived fertilizer and over utilize a lot of arid/desert farming
The America's have the 'noble savage' trope to find enlightenment with. It became so blatantly co-opting anothers' religion that many Native American tribes still refuse to teach non-tribal members there spiritual practices.
Just because you can prove mathematically that most link chains "end" at "philosophy" doesn't mean that's the end you should end up at. I spend at least 2 nights a week just reading links through wikipedia as I'm falling asleep, and I almost inevitably end up at languages and cultures or historical events that I knew little about. Philosophy isn't an end, and it's pretty meaningless without some stone cold knowledge about the world. Or you could say it comes as a result of knowledge, not before it.
philosophy helps to "compress" more knowledge about the world into "less" knowledge by shifting quantity of data into difficulty from advanced conceptual abstractions
Nothing ends at philosophy. They reach there, but they can reach lots of different places. Without scrolling on philosophy I can see more than 50 other links from that page that are thus reachable from anywhere by at most one more step.
Pick a random thing and see if it is reachable from anywhere. A lot of them are. I suspect most are, but I don't know how to run this study (other than a brute force algorithm that will use more compute than I would want to dedicate)
I think you’d be interested in Tolstoy’s view of “Philosophy”, which he expresses in “Confession / What I Believe”.
Basically that the reason why philosophy is cold and meaningless is because it tries to separate itself from the source of meaning, which is intrinsically subjective and physical and spiritual.
Philosophy’s logical conclusions are relativism and nihilism (or at least they were in Tolstoy’s time? I’m not a philosopher), because they try to understand the world with a pretext that denies its vitality.
Common folk / common sense frown on these forms of philosophy, because they miss the point in a sense; they don’t actually tell you how to live in a moral way. Tolstoy thought intellectuals grossly underrated the perspective of folk wisdom in that way. We’ve made some progress in that department, since his time, but it’s still largely true today.
> Philosophy’s logical conclusions are relativism and nihilism
Some philosophers, notably Jacobi [1], have argued this (he is credited with popularizing the term nihilism). He was arguing against enlightenment thinkers, especially Spinoza and Kant (and the rest of German Idealism). But one philosopher's conjecture isn't equal in any sense to some unequivocal stance of "Philosophy". It is worth noting, that he was arguing for "Faith" instead of speculative reason, so maybe not what you would think.
So your point is true in a very limited sense. Some philosophers have argued against some particular philosophies by suggesting that the particular philosophy they are criticizing is likely to lead to relativism and nihilism.
I tried this for awhile, but was dissatisfied. I found myself a constant consumer of intellectual material instead of being an engaged participant. Once I realized that, I set course to become more of a producer of useful things. That's led me to woodworking, to running a consultancy, to producing AI/ML for nonprofits, and to writing academic works. All in all, I enjoy life substantially.
Years ago I realized that if I bluntly categorize the things I do with my free time into buckets of "productive" and "consumptive" it's the productive things that make me feel pretty great.
I think this is a common viewpoint, because no one wants to say "yeah, being a consumer makes me feel pretty great" publicly. But arguably most people fall into that camp. Even someone who lives an intellectually rich life.
It’s also not exclusive. Different phases of life yield different productivity levels.
My very brief stint into woodworking and machining gave me a lifetime of looking at random objects from really close. Seeing how things are manufactured makes you look at every man-made object differently. It gives you a rare appreciation for craftsmanship and clever engineering. There are whole museum sections that have suddenly opened up to me.
I credit a few YouTube channels for creating the spark: The Engineer Guy, This Old Tony, AvE, Pask Makes, Xyla Foxlin to name a few.
I find consumer vs producer to be very interesting and useful distinction. Sometimes very enlightening and somewhat scary when applied to personal time spending.
One might argue that everything we produce lends itself to some kind of consumption. Moreover, not all actions lead to tangible "products", but they can lead to useful results and experiences. Sports and games are an example.
Perhaps production tends towards consumption but not the opposite. If I make music I'll probably listen to it. But I can easily listen to music without making it.
And agree sports are an interesting example. It kind of fits my mental model of consumption in many ways: something you do that's primary effect transforms you. Watching TV, playing a game, etc. The effect being something chemical that is satisfying. I guess with sports or exercise the internal change is more physical (muscle, endurance, etc) vs chemical. Although I suppose you are acting on the world as well - you are scoring a point or advancing a position. It's just more ephemeral (ends when game ends) and arbitrary.
Im sure even just in terms of chemical reactions there is going to be a clean split between stuff like playing video games or watching TV vs. sports, building something, etc. Dopamine vs... ?
I've been trying to create/produce more but I'm stuck in the consumption mindset. I can't think of what to create. How did you decide what useful things to produce?
In my youth, I read many books, and I still have many unread ones on the shelf. But, eventually, realized that, you only understand what you can create (to paraphrase feynman), and also that, what it means to be curious is to start from a burning problem or itch which differs for each one of us based on something deeper in our psyche.
Productive activities put us often into uncomfortable mental places which spurs growth of some kind - the discomfort is difficult to embrace however, which is why we resist it. In contrast, the consumptive activity comes out of a comfortable mental place and is embraced easily.
So, a question I ask myself is: what problems am i passionate about, and what am i doing (productively) about them. If I dont feel any passion, then perhaps, something is amiss (I am not communicating with my soul so-to-speak), and if I am not doing anything about them, then I need to get my ass moving and embrace the discomfort.
Do you need something? Make it - it doesn't matter what. Quality doesn't even matter, if the shoes you make turn out well you wear them, if not well go to the store and buy some. If you decide you like making shoes then make some more. If you decide it isn't fun then find something else (and come back again if you later change your mind).
See someone else make something, try to do it yourself. Sometimes you get something nice, sometimes you have fun and then throw away the worthless object.
There are a few danger signs to watch out for. Don't get caught up in learning how - you can spend the rest of your life watching "how to make a guitar" videos and never build anything. You can spend a lot of money on tools, or think you cannot do something for lack of tools - for the first one figure out how to use minimal tools (not zero!) so you don't get invested in a hobby you turn out not to enjoy - the big bucks should be only after you are sure the hobby and the tool is for you. You can start with a project too complex - start with small projects you can get done - take on the complex ones only after you are sure this hobby is for you.
Question for you: does creating mean building something? Do you count playing music as creating? What about art? What about dancing? There is no right answer to these questions except whatever you decide.
1. Find interesting people or projects that are interesting (discovery)
2. Identify the things I don't know how to do yet, or where I don't have enough information (information consumption with plan as output)
3. Execute on the plan (creation and delivery)
4. Evaluate on the outcomes -- modified ikigai is the framework I use: (1) does the world need it? (2) what is the world willing to pay for it? (3) did I enjoy it? (4) could I be good at it
Consumption is addictive - even or all the more so when we feel we are consuming worthwhile stuff (see the various major reading projects here). A useful first step is awareness of the time spent on the various time sinks: we have limited time and sinking all that available time in one thing kills that. So then, diversification away from the worst bits. Even if temporarily that means still consuming.
A second step is understanding the taste vs skill gap: unless what you produce is related to your job or training, when you start creating things your skill is poor (and your equipment probably not adapted) and it's hard to be satisfied with the quality of what you are creating. You can create something related to your job skills, or you can recognize that skill gap is a normal thing and persevere. Some classes though are excellent at carrying someone a long way in a short time.
Would love to hear more! We rarely hear stories of people "stuck" on the making/ creative side. Exciting yes - but rarely addictive in the sense of taking so much time that the rest suffers?
Typically, production requires some consumption. At a base level, however, the outcomes can be guided, satisfying my ego and leaving my mark on the universe.
Here are some suggestions: Writing, music creation, woodworking, drawing, painting, photography, podcasting, gardening, cooking, DIY home projects, chess, sports
I agree. Knowledge-seeking can become a defense or excuse not to take action. I think it can be enriching, particularly when young, but there's a balance in everything.
Not sure about the intellectual part of it, but how to live a rich life? Surely not by secretly cherishing a feeling of superiority and sophistication because these sentiments will cut you out of a lot of insights and encounters that make your life rich. True, life is a farce in a lot of ways, but who cares? Accept it where you can't change it and find your own islands of happiness. These may be intellectual if you like, but don't expect the people around you to follow the same (high) standards, that will only make you unhappy.
Good insight about how feelings of 'superiority' or 'sophistication' can suck the joy out of life. I fell into this trap myself, and it took a long time to get out of it.
That said, there are times when a certain type of appreciation of 'sophistication' is warranted - you just shouldn't use it to believe you are therefore above other people, or beyond the simple pleasures of life.
This is interminable and appears to be a disaster of mixed self-help metaphors and embarrassingly naive writing -- a TED-talk blog post, though TED talks mercifully have a length limit.
I personally found this very tedious to read and hard to follow. The author veered into weird unrelated tangents and came across of too self indulgent at times. I would rather read Seneca or Cicero instead of this.
This is a little meandering so just to focus on one part:
Philosophy can be valuable, but applying the ideas meaningfully requires discernment. I’m thinking particularly about the popularity of “Meditations”, for example.
Take Plato, for example: He and his also-famous mentor believed knowledge was a form of recollection from past lives, an idea illustrated with an unconvincing geometry lesson in Phaedo (EDIT: It’s Meno).
Sure, it’s worth stepping back to reassess what’s going to increase your “PC” to borrow from seven habits. That could involve leaving behind surface-level achievement in favor of deeper reflection, as the referenced article suggests.
But let’s not overly-romanticize ancient thinkers: Plato and Aristotle held fundamentally different views on knowledge. Even they couldn’t agree; there’s no need to treat any one of them as infallible.
Philosophy is just one of the liberal arts. This idea has declined in popularity in recent years but I still think there's a lot to be said for possessing a liberal arts education. If you have a good one your understanding of the world around you gets broader and deeper. You recognize why things are the way they are. In the long term you may spot opportunities you wouldn't have otherwise, or be able to solve problems that would have seemed intractable. Maybe most importantly you end up developing a sophisticated moral framework that's grounded in history and all the things that eventually led up to you existing and living the life you live.
You don't have to major in a liberal art or even go to college to get one, you can just read books. You also don't have to learn it all in your early 20s. You can just incorporate the great works into what you read throughout your adult life. It's very easy to find lists and recommendations online for what you should read if you want a broad-based liberal education. The general idea is simply to be informed about and understand the foundational concepts in philosophy, economics, political science, psychology, history, sociology, law, and so on. There is no need to go deep in any one them, unless you find it interesting and wish to do so. Someone who reads one or two foundational works in each of these subjects will have a wildly better understanding of the world than someone who doesn't. To me this is what living an intellectually rich life is and it's very rewarding. If nothing else, due to my liberal arts education I will never be bored in retirement, there are thousands of books that I would find it interesting to read.
I don’t have a problem with having a good understanding of classics (liberal arts is a category that far encompasses more than just classical education, though).
I do have a problem with blindly assuming Plato/other ancient philosophers were some sort of omniscient super-intelligence we should blindly follow, which I do see happen with some regularity in my own life.
Plato et al might’ve been the start of our modern understanding of ethics, but the concept of a moral life or epistemology certainly didn’t stop with him!
> Philosophy is just one of the liberal arts. This idea has declined in popularity in recent years but I still think there's a lot to be said for possessing a liberal arts education. If you have a good one your understanding of the world around you gets broader and deeper.
Look no further than all the AI debates on HN: from the perspective of someone with a couple of college classes on philosophy (not even a minor), it’s looks like a bunch of five years olds debating particle physics. Complete ignorance of what the academic precedent is, retreading ideas that philosophers have moved on from hundreds of years ago.
Yes, people are going to be ignorant of things they haven't studied previously. So, people exploring the ideas and debating them for the first time might look amateur to you, but why is that a bad thing?
This is a social media site; people can shoot the shit about whatever they want and there’s nothing wrong with that.
But… what’s the point? It’s like going into a thread about modern chemistry and debating about the four basic elements of ancient Greece. Sure you can have fun shooting the shit about what is essentially a historical novelty, but if you really want to debate about chemistry you need to open a high school textbook and get up to speed on at least the first few chapters.
The only difference is that nerds look down at philosophy and not chemistry; and the former is rarely taught in high school after which the arrested development seems to set in. No one blinks an eye telling flat earthers that they don’t know what they’re talking about.
Why shouldnt people on a message forum explore "ideas that philosophers moved on from hundreds of years ago?" It seems to suggest philosophy is more about the conclusions than the process. I cant think of an academic field where that is less true.
>If you have a good one your understanding of the world around you gets broader and deeper.
The problem is, is it _unique_ to liberal arts? That is what must be true to give it some purpose. If you can just read a bunch of books or study something else with additional positive benefits why do liberal arts?
I am a liberal arts and computer science degree holder. I don't think liberal arts is _worthless_. I do think its a terrible value proposition and that the positive side effects can be achieved while studying something far more marketable. Computer science has made me a much stronger general problem solver and a better critical thinker than liberal arts did. These are the primary skills touted by the liberal arts.
> Philosophy can be valuable, but applying the ideas meaningfully requires discernment. I’m thinking particularly about the popularity of “Meditations”, for example.
From one translation of Meditations (I forget which), and from memory, so I may have it slightly wrong:
"You can live your life in a calm flow of happiness, if you learn to think the right way, and to act the right way".
The act the right way is the hard part. The frame-of-mind stuff that lots of people focus on is necessary, but not sufficient. On its own it can be of some help, but it can also lead to traps like going too easy on one's own deficiencies of action. The thinking bits that get most of the attention, at least in stoicism, are largely reactive—the acting is proactive, as is the thinking to support it (which gets less attention in popular takes on Stoicism, and is harder).
Meditations is particularly interesting because it’s clearly just Marcus Aurelius’s diary that was doubtfully ever meant to see the light of day.
He spends a fair amount of it repeating mantras to himself over and over again, or even arguing with himself in stream-of-consciousness.
It’s Marcus Aurelius giving himself a written pep talk. He struggles to uphold those stoicism ideals his whole life, failing constantly ant it, and Meditations is an artifact of it.
There's also an awful lot of really boring and silly Stoic physics and metaphysics in there, which topics for some reason people who love the book rarely bring up, LOL.
>But let’s not overly-romanticize ancient thinkers: Plato and Aristotle held fundamentally different views on knowledge.
1) everyone agrees “overly” Romanticizing is wrong. By definition of “overly”.
2) why should having a fundamentally different view on knowledge disqualify something from being romanticized? Isnt romanticizing precisely for things that are different?
3) i think its a mischaracterization to say Plato thought “ knowledge was a form of recollection from past lives.” He was not talking about “past lives” but the “soul” (which I think wed both agree is a loaded term). He said the soul knew it before the person was born. This goes to his theory on the forma which I think is a better way to characterize his thoughts on knowledge. In general terms id say he believes truth exists in a timeless, non-empirical realm (the Forms). With the physical reality being an imperfect imitation. Which people have some mediated access to.
The example he gives about geometry is actually quite interesting. It is one of the early highlights of a deep question: is this knowledge, geometry in this case, learned/learnable or is it, somehow, innate? Do we learn this from scratch or do we have innate pre-existing cognitive structures that are “configured” by experience? If the latter, what does “learning” mean? It’s definitely not what we usually mean. If the former, we meet Hume and Kant and have to show how we arrived at space and geometry ex nihilo.
If learning is essentially based on “configuring” innate structures, you can IMO state it is eternal or uncovered or whatever poetic vehicle you desire. I’d say give these pre-modern guys a break.
These are issues being discussed way into the modern era starting (again) with the likes of Hume and Kant and no easy solutions are available. This is not a solved problem.
I think most people’s intuition is that the methodology and conventions are invented but are constrained by some transcendental reality. It seems difficult to argue its instead purely natural or purely convention.
This is very much inline with Platos theory of the forms. I dont really understand the idea that Plato’s ideas are dated.
> I mean, apparently not - this author alone takes Plato’s cave allegory at face value without spending even a moment to criticize it.
Does HE say hes over romanticizing it? No.
He would probably argue hes not over-romanticizing it. So the question isnt if over-romanticizing is improper (which is true by definition of “over”). The question is if he actually is over romanticizing.
>It is not. Read Meno. Socrates thought this, and has a very painful example of trying to prove it. Plato thought the exact same.
Im not contesting that Plato believed in reincarnation. But its not true that he thought knowledge comes from "past lives" (as in when you were previously some other person). He believed the _soul_ had direct access to knowledge. In a past life you would have only had an impression as well. This is all downstream of his actual theory of the forms though. Why not attack that if you want to attack his theory of knowledge.
I like How To Think Like a Roman Emperor's analysis of Meditations but maybe it falls into pop self-help/psychology, it discusses the history around the text and how modern psychology has similarities with some of the techniques and aphorisms.
> Take Plato, for example: He and his also-famous mentor believed knowledge was a form of recollection from past lives, an idea illustrated with an unconvincing geometry lesson in Phaedo (EDIT: It’s Meno).
I find the line of thought in "Meno" extremly impressiv. Let me try to reformulate it in modern terms.
The literary form of a dialogue emphasizes that the thoughts of the participants should not be considered as doctrines, but the whole as an investigation of a problem domain.
The dialogue starts with a distinction between empirical knowledge ("The way to Larisa") and mathematical knowledge. Empirical knowledge is something that I cannot know from introspection. In contrast, the nature of mathematical knowledge comes from inside the mind. This is demonstrated by an uneducated, but smart child (a slave boy). The child is guided to discover a mathematical insight by questions alone. At first the boy does not know the right answer to an initial question. Then Socartes starts again with a simple question the boy is able to answer. Then a sequence of other questions follows each building on the previous answers. Socrates only questions, the boy only answers. Finally the boy arrives at the correct answer of the initial question whose answer he did not know at the start.
This scene should demonstrate the essence of mathematical proof. First we do not know the answer of a mathematical problem. Step-by-step we clarify our understanding, until we arrive at an answer. At this stage we know whether the particular mathematical statement is true or false. We expanded our understanding by only just thinking. In one way it is new knowledge (we now know something we did not, when we looked for a proof), in another way the knowledge was always there, just hidden in our mind.
At this point Socrates hits a limit where he runs out of questions to invistigate this further. This is when he starts to tell a story (the greek word for story is "myth"). Such stories are just tools to further investigate a problem when purely theoretical thoughts come to an end. In the dialogue it is also accompanied by a lot of joking, and "let me speculate" and "don't take it too serious" sort of remarks. So he reminds his fellows about some old stories (that he adapts and decorates a little to match the problem) about reincarnation where one looses the memory of one's past life but has occasionally some sort of flashbacks. This is more or less the whole point of the story: Perhaps we should think of mathematical knowledge as analogous to memory, but in a in a transcendent way.
Our modern doctrins are not very much off: Our ability of mathematical thinking is something that is inherent to us, more specifically to our brains. The blueprint (a sort of memory?) for our brains are in our genes. This way we are a sort of reincarnation of our parents, but in a state were we have to undergo all the mathematical training again.
What Plato lacks is a theory of evolutionary epistemology. But this is a really new development.
Seek movement .Move towards discomfort. Settle only in your values, never in loyalties or kinship. Be homeless in regards to ideologies, be merciless to those that subvert what your values brought about , be subversive to all things to see the brittleness of things.
Disregard detected retardations in yourself, invest your lifes work in little turtles crawling towards abilities up the scenario tree. Do not attach, to fortresses, kings and nations built on those branches.
I have been wondering lately if "intellectually rich" can be found solely in books.
I read Jim Stanford's Economics for Everyone, and he recommends to go out and talk to people and see what problems they are having in life.
That's not to say that long time dead philosophers cannot give good insights, but I feel that looking at other people's problems (especially in different cultures) is a lot more relevant for understanding the world.
I think one of the advantages of reading very old material is a) it's not bogged down by modern ideology, b) imparting the realization that some human issues and ideas have been around a very long time (see for instance dialogues in Thucydides History of the Peloponnesian War), b) some ideas and insights have a timelessness to them. Take for instance the Tao Te Ching. I found it retains influential power, despite my not being completely on board.
As with nearly anything, an obsessive pursuit of knowledge, simple living, or 'enlightenment' to the exclusion of other things can be very harmful.
We should be constantly exposing ourselves to new ideas and exploring new avenues; but diving down a rabbit hole for a years-long journey is not the way.
Sitting in a mountain shack trying to digest the best 100 (or 1000) books ever written, might yield some real benefits; but at what cost?
That is my conception of the world that we all have different interests and cognitive functions. Also, call it serenpidity, synchronicity, fate or luck, but as this article showed, the best ideas come from places you could never have expected.
Read about the discovery of LSD if you haven't, it's one of the perfect example of this.
So you have to find your nature, the garden of iteas that resonates with you. For that, just read.
From any topic that interests you and sometimes, dare to read something you would never do. Comics, mangas, niche recipes, biographies, romance, everything is fair game and you never know, sometimes you might just click on something you never might otherwise.
In the age of Wikipedia, kindles and libraries, you really have no excuse to not indulge in your curiosity.
For all we know, we could ever be "hard-coded" to love certain topics more than others(https://www.europeanscientist.com/en/research/the-way-we-app...). Maybe in the future, a drop of saliva would be enough to know if you should study architecture or dancing ?
The universe is a cruel, uncaring void. The key to being happy isn’t a search for meaning, it’s to just keep yourself busy with unimportant nonsense, and eventually you’ll be dead.
- BoJack Horseman
A lot of passion was put into this article. I appreciate that. And I do think that there are several huge themes that need to be periodically grappled with.
Just to pick one, the ego hit when jumping into a new field is real (I'm currently immersed in math & ML from a CS background). It's one of the things that I feel is least talked about. It's very easy to peak in a field and then rest on your laurels. Despite being particularly willing to start at the bottom, I also identify as "being smart," and getting schooled by 22 year olds stings.
But the rewards for "owning" two peaks are so huge, and much of the process is so satisfying.
This stirs up a good discussion. My way of having a satisfying intellectual life is not just by juggling many ideas, but also by problem solving. I find immense satisfaction in making something work or creating something that didn't exist before. Many times, this requires problem solving with creativity, compromise and tradeoffs. Some times, it requires deep diving into academic papers and doing some math. When this ends up working it is truly a triumphant feeling; however it might sometimes not work at all.
Another thing is meeting and absorbing knowledge from other people. It's incredible to learn or even just watch skillful people do their thing.
I am confused though how this was a difficult problem to begin with, particularly with the internet. It is not exactly hard to find intellectually stimulating concepts if that's what gets you off.
I also find "philosophy" to be a pretty miserable and unrewarding topic to think about, and I tend to run quickly away from those who want to talk about it. I find it very curious that the author finds it to be a natural place for your focus to land. I think this is a red herring: the secret to long-term contentment is not thinking at all if it's not strictly necessary. Aristotle got "contemplation is the greatest good" dead wrong.
Philosophy as a concept isn't an issue; but we tend to romanticize the tendency to neurotically examine even when we know finding "truth" isn't possible, and I've noted a tendency in people so devoted to unconsciously emotionally attach to what are ultimately word games. This concerns me. Perhaps we should instead romanticize living a contented existence, some of which will surely still involve reading and discussing philosophy (in moderation, of course).
Read Nobel Literature too young to understand but old enough to remember the stories. Then when "life happens" the meaning of those Nobel Books hits with a physical epiphany and sudden unexpected wisdom is realized.
it is the muscle working, the tide going back and forth.
i liked reading it, lots of things to unpack,
new descriptions of the elephant in the room to absorb.
The conclusion itches me, (sorry for the spoil, readers)
> After all, aren’t we all trying to understand our place in the universe?
are you sure about that ?
that "you" are trying to do that, or that,
something else works hard on you,
much like in those "Goals that are physically, emotionally and economically crushing us"
I didn't have time to get through the whole article today, but I did spend some time with my kids playing the Wikipedia first link game, which we enjoyed. We kept trying to find one that didn't end in Philosophy, and my youngest son said we should try Brick. Sure enough, it ended in a loop consisting of Existence and Reality.
I am still searching for the definition of "Intellectually Rich Life".
There are some compelling and imaginative calls in the article, but can we drop with the metaphors? I rather have the author develop deeper examples, instead of vague focus and practicality.
Maybe because I am not searching for inspiration, but detailed roadmaps.
I think engaging with works of fiction is just as important. Like anything, if a work of fiction engages and challenges you, and you are an intentional reader, it exercises very important muscles.
fiction absolutely can be intellectual. 1984, 451 Fahrenheit, anything dostoevsky or heinlein.
in fact, by adding that intellectualism is what makes these stand out.
But i do specify non-fiction because I wouldnt say most fiction is intellectual; or if you try to approach some fiction you'll quickly dig deeper than what's actually there and then it's just you superimposing.
The example i like is colour metaphors. Shakespeare will say that a character put a green shirt on. You're supposed to say 'thats just a new shirt, not the colour green' but no. It actually really is just the colour green. You cant dig too deep on most fiction.
I was initially fairly sceptical of this essay, but getting to the parts about Erdős I find myself more in agreement. The title misled me!
Intellectualism for the sake of intellectualism is a road that leads to isolation. And then, what's the point of it all?
Connection and collaboration is where it's at - which is more or less what the author concludes, although still under the banner of intellectuality. Perhaps my definition of intellect is/was too narrow?
Perhaps a more enlightening view is in the book "The Socratic Method," by Ward Farnsworth, who is dean of the UTexas Law School. This is a great book for those just starting on the adulthood road, though it could have been shorter.
It analyzes the dialogs of Socrates with practicality in mind, showing how to question the world around you, question your own beliefs, and question the beliefs of others, all without coming off like a dick (as Socrates often does). Moreover, as related to the OP's article, it tells you precisely how Socrates would have defined an intellectually rich life, and I think Farnsworth is correct.
Farnsworth's Socratic method is about much more than just asking questions. The trite "Know thyself" injunction is seen to be a specific outgrowth of the Socratic method, echoing in some way the OP's claim that everything tracks to philosophy.
Incidentally, the book includes a stunning revelation from Ben Franklin saying that he found the Socratic method to be the best way of getting people to change their mind and do what he wanted. He gave it up, however, because it was too powerful a tool and he decided to adopt instead a more diffident personality, which he found also successful.
I would have thought a book like this would sell about 10 copies, but it has 800 comments on Amazon! [I have no connection with the author or with Amazon.]
I'm not sure about the metaphors. The "Axe of Satisfaction" suggests that some of the ills of late-stage capitalism can be overcome through individual grit alone. Maybe we need to band together and target the root system rather than hacking down individual trees?
Discussing this and its implications in a direct and serious manner is, regrettably, unpalatable in polite company. Few are willing to accept the risk of discussing it openly.
there are 25 comments here now, but none of them yet mention the opening idea of TFA, that if you click the first link you see on wikipedia and lather, rinse, repeat, you will get to philosophy every time.
if true, this is fascinating.
...
i just tried it a few times, and it worked! although the reason seems to be a bit less interesting. biography page: "so and so was a botanist" --> and we're headed to philosophy. "political party" --> decision making. "vehicle ramming attack" --> --> power.
encyclopedias start each page by saying what category something is in, and you inevitably category your way back to, metaphorically speaking, earth, air, fire, or water
I think the explanation is simple: The first link is usually the category of the article's lemma. Or something else which is a more general or abstract word. Following the links you will lead you to the most abstract things and eventually to thinking about abstract things, which is philosophy.
From the title I expected something serious. I gave up halfway, having pigeonholed the pompous verbiage as a first cousin to Women Who Run With The Wolves. But really, the game was up when I read the phrase "late stage capitalism", which is the verbal equivalent of a plague bell, used by halfwits to warn us of their presence.
Friends, here's how to have an intellectually rich life: read serious authors. There's Montaigne out there. There's Orwell. After a while, you'll recognize good writing and thinking, and you won't waste your time on pap.
I haven't read either, but if you mean that them using the phrase legitimates it, then that isn't so. Clever people have invented many phrases that later become stale or absurd. If nothing else, consider that both men are long dead, whilst capitalism's "late" stage continues unabated.
In trying to live an intellectually rich life, there's a risk of adding too much noise. Chasing more input, more ideas, more learning.
Sometimes less really is more.
Depth often comes not from adding, but from subtracting. Clear away the noise, and what’s left tends to have 'meaning'.
Personally I prefer a deep life to a rich life, but maybe that's just semantics...
Bro, that was a lot of text... I mean, chill. Life is simpler then that. Enjoy your flaws and get along with things as they are, without the need of a "framework" to navigate life
Congrats, yours is the most condescending comment on this site today.
That sounds like you have already got a framework that works for you, which is great for you. Too bad it's a framework that drives you to upbraid innocent strangers on the internet.
Not everyone can take action on the words "just chill." We're all in different places in life—think of it as a state space model. The same vector of force results in different coordinates when applied to different coordinates.
I appreciate the spirit of this essay, but I think it overstates the idea that intellectual pursuits are an escape from modern dissatisfaction. I've spent most of my life driven by curiosity, forming my identity around being someone who seeks knowledge. But over time I’ve come to see how that, too, can become a kind of consumerism—chasing ideas for the dopamine hit of a new insight, then feeling the letdown and scrambling for the next one.
The essay frames an intellectually rich life as a kind of antidote to consumer culture, but for me it often mirrors the same patterns: FOMO, compulsiveness, neglect of relationships, a deep anxiety that I’ll never learn enough. The awareness that I’ll only ever scratch the surface of all there is to know has become a source of existential stress, not peace.
This isn’t to say intellectual life isn’t meaningful—but it's not a cure-all. It can be just as prone to distortion as anything else if pursued as a form of escape.
I appreciate this perspective as it matches mine and I think comes from experience. I imagine myself sitting on my peak and seeing millions, maybe billions, of other peaks and the desire to traverse them propels me forward. However, as soon as I'm a quarter of the way up one, I start to think, what am I missing on the other peaks? That's the FOMO. Then I spend the next five years of my life partially breaching a thousand ideas and never experiencing satisfaction.
For my part, one of the most striking things which I recall from my youth was reading Dumas' _The Count of Monte Cristo_ and the Abbé Faria contending that everything a gentleman needed to make his way in life was contained in less than 100 books --- which he had memorized the content of, and could impart to the young Edmond Dantes.
A naïve younger me tried to brute force this by reading one non-fiction book from each major section of the Dewey Decimal system catalog, but was stymied by the paucity of a high school library in a county in the second smallest tax base in the state....
Since then, I've actually been trying to put that list together (and lightly updating it for availability from Project Gutenberg/Librivox).
https://www.goodreads.com/review/list/21394355-william-adams...
Suggestions and comments and recommendations welcome.
I am about a quarter of the way through Modern Library’s top 100 and it has been a worthwhile journey. It is “just” literary fiction but it is among the best humanity has produced. I have learned so much about the human condition, my ability to articulate ideas has improved tremendously, and I feel like my mind has been “freed from the tyranny of the present” (to quote Cicero).
https://sites.prh.com/modern-library-top-100
Anyone who puts "Ulysses" at the top of a best books list is suffering from expertitis. Ulysses has a massive user experience problem. It's hard. Dense, convoluted, absurd. If your friend asks you for a good book, you don't recommend it. The only time you do is when your college English major, or advanced highschooler, who is bored with the tropes of even very good novels wants to stretch themselves. Then you hand them this book.
Why are you conflating "best" with "what you would recommend a friend"?
Many of the best things in life are hard. And you wouldn't necessarily recommend them to a friend.
When you consider specific domains, often the best instances of X tend to be harder versions of X. Or, when people become familiar with many instances of X they seek out the "best" instances of X. Its natural that those best instances would be difficult for people unfamiliar with the domain.
"Many of the best things in life are hard. And you wouldn't necessarily recommend them to a friend."
Yup.
>Or, when people become familiar with many instances of X they seek out the "best" instances of X
I think you're saying the same thing as the GP? Ulysses is a book for lit nerds, which I suppose the Modern Library board were.
Looking at the list, there's hardly any books from after mid 20th century. That makes me think that the board comprised primarily old lit nerds, who stopped reading long before voting. The list is also super ethno centric, which makes me more dubious still about the claims for "best" anything.
According to the NYT[1], between 1950 and 2018 95% of published English-language fiction authors were white. That Top 100 Novel list contains at least 3 black authors, Ellison, Wright, and Baldwin. Considering that the percentage of black authors for the period 1900-2000 was probably even less than for 1950-2000, and that there are actually only 75 unique authors in that list, on its face I don't see the bias by the voters. The bias is in the disproportionate share of published white authors.
[1] https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/12/11/opinion/cultu...
How did you find Ulysses, was it a good read for you?
Yes, this list reads like one a Midwestern high schooler would go through to impress his failed literature teacher, who will write him a nice recommendation letter for the ultra-conformist university of his dreams, dooming him to 25 years of debt and a miserable life working as a consultant
Yes, but now tell us how you really feel.
Expertitis is not a thing and your criticism is based merely on public perception of the book and not the book itself. In case it wasn’t clear, I disagree completely: Ulysses is very worthy of the honor. It is as approachable as it is lofty.
I agree, and in fact I did not start with Ulysses and do not recommend people do. I read 2-10 on the list, then Hamlet, then Ulysses - which I feel mostly prepared me for it. I did love it, but it is not an easy read, and took me the better part of a month to get through.
There's definitely some of that going on.
I've gotten the same feeling watching old movies a second time.
I would watch a movie when I was young, and it just came out. It would be "modern", maybe state of the art, and it would have an impact on me. But I was young, and easily impressed by the cliche or trite.
And then I would watch the same movie decades later. Times changed, the art has changed, casting, pacing, effects have all advanced to support the storytelling. And I am older, a different person, and maybe more aware of what is "timeless" with a little more experience under my belt.
It might be a historical deep dive, but compared to the available material our present has, some older media should drop off the list.
> It's hard. Dense, convoluted, absurd.
These are a few of my favorite things!
> Ulysses has a massive user experience problem
Seems this book is not intended for you then!
Exactly. This is extremely boring piece of writing.
I've read more than half of those, and every time I see that list, I really wish that almost every book would be paired w/ one which enhances/comments on either the book or that same theme.
e.g., _Kim_ by Rudyard Kipling should be paired w/ Robert Heinlein's _Citizen of the Galaxy_, or _The Grapes of Wrath_, which was cribbed from Sanora Babb's notes w/o permission should be paired w/ her _Whose Names Are Unknown_:
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/1197158.Whose_Names_Are_...
I’m not a literary scholar, but this seems like a great use case for ChatGPT. I’ve used it for music explorations and found it surprisingly good at providing context and interesting suggestions. I tried your idea with The Grapes of Wrath and it surfaced Whose Names Are Unknown, with a thoughtful explanation. Obviously it’s qualitative, but you can shape the prompt to reflect your taste and still get some worthwhile discoveries.
[1] https://chatgpt.com/share/68150654-bebc-8010-ad4b-050f5b39d4...
I would also suggest the childrens books Cheaper by the Dozen, The Musicians of Brennan, Morris' Disappearing Bag and The Red Badge of Courage.
I'd maybe throw in some of the little house on the prairie books as well, especially the one where they all almost froze to death.
I think being able to appreciate books as an adult is pretty contingent on being exposed to good books as a youth.
I really like this idea. I didn't even know about Whose Names Are Unknown... added it to the queue.
I don't think this is a very good list that should call itself top 100. Maybe anglophone top 100, but even then I'd question some of the choices. I completely ignores a ton of more important works in non-English languages.
The Modern Library is a publishing imprint of Random House so it’s pretty much focused on works in English.
Seeing that I am on HN and can unleash unrestrained pedantry I wish to ask where Cicero actually writes that because I cannot find it?
The full quote is allegedly "The purpose of education is to free the student from the tyranny of the present." ...I picked it up in Neil Postman's Amusing Ourselves to Death, but he didn't cite which work it came from. Goodreads attributes it to "Selected Works".
The Roman version of "trust me bro"
I dodn't think it's a quote; more a paraphrase of: https://www.loebclassics.com/view/marcus_tullius_cicero-orat...
I thought Mark Twain said that. /ducks
Really wish they had that list in order of difficulty - if you start with Ulysses, you're gonna have a bad time.
I’ve read 53 of the fiction, 10 of the non-fiction (which tracks with my being an English major).
That's a dreadful list in my opinion. Absurdly Anglocentric (esp. Americo-centric). I'm not saying they're bad books but a really far cry from "among the best humanity has produced". Not a single south-american novel? Not a single romance language book as a matter of fact? I highly recommend you diversify your reading choices.
Open to suggestions.
would have loved to see some non native English speaking authors on the list. (instead of listing some authors twice - as great as they are). There were 2 Russians that stood out but no Camus, Feuchtwanger, Remarque, Musil, Borges, ...
Yes, it's kind of a strange slice - we get Faulkner three times and we get Joseph Conrad no fewer than four times(!), but not a single book from Dostoevsky or Tolstoy? No Bulgakov, no Turgenev? No Flaubert?
Lermontov's 'Hero of Our Time' is probably my favorite Russian novel, and I say that as someone who absolutely adores Dostoevsky. It still feels relevant and modern.
FWIW, I would argue that Tolstoy is extremely overrated as a writer (but agree with your other suggestions).
Or just rename the list "Top 100 Novels in the English Language".
English was Joseph Conrad's third language.
You inspired me to do the same. I just ordered the first five, and will continue down the list.
Out of the list, I read 8 books so far, but all of them in Czech.
Enjoy your journey!
This list is kind of strange. Firstly, it is very "anglo-saxon" oriented. It is a mixture of "Big Literature", interesting for someone who is literature student, like ULYSSES (which is at the same time a great novel and a boring as hell novel) with true gems, like Orwell or Joseph Conrad-Korzeniowski with additions like Robert Graves writing, which has mostly entertainment value equal to average pseudo-documentaries from Netflix and pop stuff like Vonnegut' books (which are, at least, not boring).
Still, a lot of interesting stuff, Orwell, unfortunately, never gets old, pity Ray Bradbury was omitted, as Fahrenheit 451 is getting more and more up-to-date.
What an awful list!
And I say that as a Modern Literature major who has read a lot on that list. FAULKNER IS A TERRIBLE WRITER! And while James Joyce and some of the others are good writers, they don't deserve multiple entries in the top 100.
It's clear this list is really "5 librarians personal favorites."
The sentence "FAULKNER IS A TERRIBLE WRITER" is one of the most incredible sets of words I've ever had the misfortune to lay my eyes upon.
The Sound and the Fury is an incredible piece of art with a beautifully structured narrative, in my reading of it. Why do you say he's a terrible writer in your opinion? Who would you rank higher?
It was from a list of 440 books (possibly what Random House then had in stock) and voted on by the board members --- it's been widely criticized/commented on, see the Wikipedia article for some further links on this.
Can you recommend a better one? I picked it at random when I wanted to explore literature, but it seemed to be cited often enough.
My suggestion would be to start with the authors nominated for a Nobel prize for literature.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Nobel_laureates_in_Lit...
Filtering by those available in readily available English translations should yield a workable list.
One that does not omit Dostoevsky or García Marquez over mediocre books in the English language would be a good start.
Again, this list is from Random House, a major American English-language book publisher.
"Be careful… about this reading you refer to, this reading of many different authors and books of every description. You should be extending your stay among writers whose genius is unquestionable, deriving constant nourishment from them if you wish to gain anything from your reading that will find a lasting place in your mind."
- Seneca, Letters
I was surprised to learn that the temptation to read too many things was also a problem 2,000 years ago. This inspired me to work on a short list of books that I know deeply.
That sounds horrific
Sucks that the vast majority of those books were lost forever. Early Christianity was a scourge in that regard, how much culture we lost forever because of those zealots.
I didn't realize Early Christianity had a monopoly on the destruction of books? As far as I know the burning of rival civilizations has been happening for thousands of years.
I'm speaking specifically about Western classics (esp. Roman).
I would say that material decay, neglect, economic collapse, war, and changing cultural priorities played a far greater role in the loss of these texts rather than the ones lost to zealous Christians. It's just weird to single that group out when their actions represent a minority in the overall loss of these ancient texts.
St John's College is known for their Great Books curriculum - the foundation of their four year program - where students read the primary text of western civilization.
It's always held a soft spot in my heart as my own experience was mostly reading derivative descriptions and the rare times when I was able to read a primary text during my coursework were always my happiest memories.
1. https://www.sjc.edu/academic-programs/undergraduate/great-bo...
Trying to learn Newtonian Mechanics from Philosophiæ Naturalis Principia Mathematica is kinda dumb though.
I certainly noticed that it was ineffective in discussing implications with the students. I found Boyle's observations far more effective in teaching science.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philosophi%C3%A6_Naturalis_Pri...
I had an elective class at St. John's where we read selections from Newton's Principia (ISBN 9781888009262) together with William Blake's long poem "Jerusalem, the Emanation of the Giant Albion".
The goal was not to learn how to do physics calculations, but to understand each writer's concept of reality and humanity's relationship to it. I remember that Blake really focused on the worth of actually instantiated reality, what he called "minute particulars", in contrast to Newton's abstractions:
Also, Newton's Principia uses Euclidian-style demonstrations to illustrate many of his points, whereas today we would use algebraic calculus. That was fun, since everyone in the room had also worked through the first book of Euclid's Elements.Similarly, a related project is an effort to assemble a chronological list of books where the oldest text which is still valid given contemporary knowledge of the subject is listed includes Euclid's _Elements_ of course:
https://www.goodreads.com/review/list/21394355?shelf=chronol...
One issue I have with modern teaching of both Math and Physics though is that they give the "correct" answer to fast which teaches the material and accelerates learning but I think it also leaves a lot of motivations for why certain decisions were come to and how which is important.
Recently I've been following long with the Distance Ladder challenge I saw on 3 blue 1 brown with Terence Tao. Going through those question is motivating because those questions are based in solving navigational problems. I fear that with the ever increasing the low friction in life we are stealing the challenge and things for people to consider to build up there problem solving ability before the curtain is pulled.
I think its also more motivating to learn considering more interesting questions especially in math. All this to say going back to the source material while not the most modern accurate physics it usually does include large amounts of motivation to explain why things are logical and what they are doing it for. To be fair I haven't read the Philosophiae Naturalis Principia but I have read other old book and wager it has similarities
Hmm but you can (an in fact do, in many physics programs) follow the historical development of theories using modern textbooks. The pedagogical value is in understanding, not exactly in wading through the archaic language and the confused early papers.
Even for modern theories like general relativity people study by textbooks written many decades after the fact, with a clear picture after things were settled, and not by Einstein's first papers :)
> Trying to learn Newtonian Mechanics from Philosophiæ Naturalis Principia Mathematica is kinda dumb though.
It'd be like wanting to improve your cardio health so you try to climb K2. The edition I have has 150+ pages of just introduction. You have to wade through all of that just to be able to figure out how to read the rest of the tome. It is cool, though!
Let’s be honest, trying to learn Newtonian mechanics by majoring in the humanities probably isn’t the best approach. Maybe that’s not really what the program is meant for in the first place.
Newton intentionally made it difficult because he didn’t want to be bothered by questions from lesser minds.
I’ll never forget the night sjc students invited me to smoke weed and listen to some Charles Mingus.
A co-worker mentioned this school when his son selected it for a visit, and I quite envy the young man the chance to attend --- I believe I got everything from their reading list --- if I missed something, let me know.
They have a graduate program available at a distance if you feel particularly drawn to their learning style. Basically covers a subset of the UG curriculum.
Yeah, I considered that --- just not an option financially --- my workplace is actually next door to a private university, and I've been considering getting a Masters in CS there, then going on to get a PhD....
I'm not sure what's the value in spending time reading obsolete scientific books. "The Fahrenheit Scale"?
Based on your interest in Tacitus and Thucydides, I might recommend the The Histories of Polybius. [1] It is absolutely mind-blowing to me that he actually witnessed the events he writes about, and how analogous it is to modern-day geopolitics.
By the way, thank you for providing your list of books - I picked up a few future reads from it.
1. https://www.gutenberg.org/files/44125/44125-h/44125-h.htm
Agreed, added. Thanks!
My pleasure!
I'm sure you're familiar with the Harvard Classics (5 foot shelf) and have browsed their volumes?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harvard_Classics
I actually did your Dewey Decimal project: https://www.dahosek.com/category/dewey-decimal-project/ I read one book out of each “decade” of the Dewey catalog from my local library (which is reasonably well stocked). It was a bit less than the predicted 100 books since there are some gaps in both the system and the collection of my library, but it was an interesting way to discover things I didn’t know I didn’t know.
I like your idea, but it's missing any sort of practical skills (which Dantes and Faria certainly had).
What would be more interesting, IMHO, books that Cyrus Smith from The Mysterious Island had memorized.
Just from what I saw on HN, I remember Gingery books on metal workshop from scratch, and some homesteading manual from late 19th century.
The most important books are things like first aid and CPR. Or better yet a class because hands on experience beat books learning.
I love the Gingery books and they are great foundations for a hobby. However even in a end of civilization scenario we only need a small minority who knows that content who can teach the rest - that is at best, but quite likely there won't be enough industrial base to produce the aluminum needed and so you are stuck with useless knowledge. Even your 19th century homesteading tends to assume far more industrial base to make some annoyingly hard things.
Most so called practical skills are either not practical in modern civilization (there is far too much population for us all the be hunter/gathers even if we want to); or they are only practical in context of current times. I've seen how to wire your house for electric lights books from the 1920s - most of the things shown wouldn't pass code today. My house was built in 1970, and there are a lot of things that still work but there is good reason we don't allow that anymore.
Had Self-aid and buddy care when I was in the service, and became qualified and volunteered as an EMT for a while after getting out. I do have a Wilderness Survival First Aid Book on my Kindle, and I'll definitely add it to this list.
I actually had a copy of _The Metal Lathe (Build Your Own Metal Working Shop From Scrap, Volume 2)_ ages ago, and slotting in the full leatherbound edition of all 7 volumes is likewise a good fit.
Trying to focus on intellectual things --- practical skills invites the list becoming an extension of my various interests (note the extant shelves on archery and woodworking) and their various intersections, e.g.,
https://www.lumberjocks.com/showcase/archery-case-ascham-of-...
Edit: did add a first aid book, as well as the 7 volume edition of "The Gingery Books".
“The Good Life” by Helen and Scott Nearing has an excellent bibliography/citations section.
How to build stone houses, compost and farm organically, etc. A good primer on homesteading. Contains references to things like 19th century homestead manuals
I've considered adding "The Foxfire" books (which I read when I was much younger) and perhaps a text by Roy Underhill, but as noted elsethread, this is intended as an academic/social list.
> reading one non-fiction book from each major section of the Dewey Decimal system catalog
This actually sounds really fun. Not so much in an optimized way, but more like just going to the library and picking a decimal heading and then just selecting a cool-looking book in that heading and reading it, then repeat.
It was.
Tried to do it again in college, but using the LoC headings, but ran out of time and graduated before running out of college/headings.
To this day, when going to the library, I try to keep this in mind when looking over the new books, and if there is one on a major/notable subject I can't recall having read a book on, grab it.
I only read great literature, classics, history books my whole life. This year (Aged 48) I decided to pepper in a "fluff" book or two. I forced myself to read something I normally wouldn't. I read "The Situation" (Jersey Shore) and Mathew Perry (Friends) "auto" biographies. I actually had some profound insights about depression and substance abuse from those two. Of course, I don't recommend you read either, but if you never read "airport fiction" or "pop biographies" it might prove interesting.
I've come around to the idea that anything and anyone can be interesting and enriching if you approach it with the right level of curiosity.
Doesn't always play out but it adds to the spice of life when you can draw insight from places you never expected to.
How would you characterize the differences between the two categories of books that you read?
There are some works from the more recent past that might add to this list:
https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2024/books/best-books-21...
https://www.nypl.org/voices/print-publications/books-of-the-...
One of my personal favorites, but a very difficult read: _Summa Technologiae_ by Stanislaw Lem. It's so difficult I haven't actually finished it. It's remarkably dense.
Dumas himself had a personal library of about 6,000 books at its peak. If you don't already have them on your list, historians have mentioned several books that were known to have strongly influenced him:
Walter Scott's historical novels, particularly "Ivanhoe" and "Waverley," which inspired Dumas' approach to historical fiction
James Fenimore Cooper's frontier adventures, which influenced his action narratives
Lord Byron's romantic poetry and persona, which shaped Dumas' conception of the romantic hero
Schiller's play "The Conspiracy of Fiesco at Genoa," which Dumas translated and adapted early in his career
Shakespeare's dramatic works
Memoirs of historical figures, particularly those from the 17th and 18th centuries, including Courtilz de Sandras' "Mémoires de M. d'Artagnan," which became the foundation for "The Three Musketeers"
Plutarch's "Lives," which informed his understanding of classical historical figures
Works by Abbé Prévost and other French novelists of the 18th century
The Bible and classical mythology
Some books I would put on this list: Knowledge and Decisions by Thomas Sowell, Le Rouge et le Noir by Stendhal, Up From Slavery by Booker T. Washington, 1984 by George Orwell.
Tony Judt.
"Reappraisals" and "When the Facts Change" should be on top of everyone's reading list. Few indeed are those who can write prose as crisp, succinct and erudite as he did.
I love this idea, and the lost is full of gems, but I see a couple of issues. If you actually intend you or anyone else to read these and stay sane I'd remove the mathematical tables (there is value in reading these, but only for a very rare soul), the Bible (lots of really dry stuff about begetting and knowing), the complete works of Shakespeare (hard to understand without careful study, way too long to cafefully study).
Shakespeare is worthwhile but much easier to understand when you see it performed, which is how it was meant to be experienced anyway.
My Shakespeare class in college was based around performing a play at the end of the semester. We read about half a dozen plays, but the bulk of our work was based around preparing to perform Hamlet (each semester, a different play was performed, with fall being Comedies/Histories and Spring being Tragedies/Romances).
The big challenge is that a lot of plays are rarely performed. I had the good fortune of hearing an interview with Kenneth Brannagh where he talked about how Shakespeare is better experienced by watching a performance than reading a text and he made an aside about how it’s unlikely you’re going to get to see Henry IV part II performed and then spotting that there was a free performance of that exact play being given at the Chicago Cultural Center. This turned out to be part of a series of staged readings of all the plays. I missed the beginning of the sequence, but stuck around to the end. One of the coolest moments of this came when I was attending a play at the Goodman Theatre which had the actors interacting with audience members during intermission and one of the actors in the play recognized me from the audience of the staged readings.
There are more or less accessible TV performances. The definitive complete collection is probably the BBC Shakespeare, available on iPlayer and DVD.
Some of the plays have also snuck onto YouTube.
Yes, exactly. A lot of people forget that he wrote ‘plays’ and not ‘reads’
He had to; a large part of his audience would have been unable to read.
A lot of European literature was poetry for the same reason. Its only because literacy rates have risen that prose has become more popular.
> the Bible (lots of really dry stuff about begetting and knowing)
I'd suggest replacing the Bible with just the Gospels (Matthew, Mark, Luke[0], and John). Removing it entirely seems like a mistake since you'd lose a lot of the literary and moral underpinnings of Western culture, but having to read the bible in its entirely sounds exhausting. I did it (reading all four gospels) recently and can attest even outside of the religious aspects the retelling of the same tragic story in four different was is a fascinating literary experience.
[0] Technically we should through Acts in there too since Luke-Acts are essentially one book, but it's not a gospel so I left it out. Plus quite frankly while I did read it I found it way more boring than the others; turns out that Jesus fellow is a way more interesting main character than Paul :)
I think the Bible can mostly be distilled to Genesis, Exodus and the Gospels without losing too much. Each of those books is eminently legible in its own right. You could arguably make the sermon on the mount its own book, “communist manifesto” style.
I think those individual chapters would be super compelling to modern readers with or without a religious background, but their legibility is held back by the rest of the Bible’s contents. How is someone non-religious supposed to figure out that it’s ok to start reading a book at section 2, chapter 1? :)
Isaiah for the poetic language and imagery deeply embedded in Western culture. Psalms for raw expression of the emotions at the heart of the human condition: suffering, rejection, abandonment, joy, and praise.
I'm inclined to agree, except to add that Ecclesiastes stands on its own as a great piece of philosophy, and Revelations is pretty influential as well as having some pretty entertaining madness.
It's argued that God had a plan (all-knowing). The compelling argument to read the Old Testament in full before the New Testament is that this whole thing was a deliberate sequence. That's if you are willing to entertain the notion on a literary level (forget about belief). Take the story of Samson for example, one argument is that God showed that humans would persecute a man whom humanity couldn't even contemplate could have gotten his powers from God. It's a setup for Christ.
You can distill if you are looking for moral teachings, but you can't if you want to know this guys (that guy up in the sky) full plan, in which case you have to entertain that it was a sequence of events. It's very weird, but almost makes going through the whole Bible fascinating as a serial drama. One thing led to another.
I totally agree. I think for theological reasons (if your goal is to convince yourself that Jesus is the Messiah of the Abrahamic religions), then it can’t be distilled.
However, I do think the abrahamic origin stories (genesis), the tribulations of the Jewish people in Egypt and reception of the Ten Commandments (exodus), and the moral teachings of Christ that replace those commandments (gospels) are more or less self-contained and free-standing, if you’re trying to understand them at face value.
The gospels in particular contain a good moral teachings that are arguably more valuable than anything else in the book. Like really clear directives on how to live and carry yourself.
In my Weird Bible, I’d cold open with the sermon on the mount, followed by the Pharisees and the passion, and recursively hyper-link to every New Testament or Old Testament thing that supports those “primary” stories. I feel like if you arranged the Bible into a neat “tree” structure that way, the main load-bearing trunks would be the books mentioned.
I appreciate your points. Morality is what most people want to take away from all of these books, but the thing they want to leave behind is one requirement that God seems to have, and that's straight up obedience. Obedience doesn't really fit inside morality, and in fact if you just distill morality out, obedience won't make it. The Old Testament hammers home the need for obedience to God's laws in story after story, until finally God just kinda lets us know that "hey you guys really cannot follow the law, so lets shift to a relationship framework with Christ". That's how I've been making sense of WHAT the Old Testament is in the context of the sequence, and further, why I don't ignore it because it seems to be he values both morality and obedience (and again, obedience doesn't fit into morality - Just the story of Abraham and his son, there's nothing moral about it).
It's a thoroughly Christian view, that being humans lack the capacity to follow God's laws because we're inherently sinners - but that's a whole nother' can of worms. It's kind of like a Kindergarten teacher (God) letting the kids run the show for a day (Old Testament), just to make it clear, they can't manage it. It's quite a thing to believe such a supreme being would run a sequence like that on us (in fact, that's how I make sense of a lot of the craziness in the world, that God would in fact let things run its course, however messed up (even in modern times, e.g - the narcissistic scale of social media, wars, factory slavery in China, migrant slavery in Mideast construction projects, abject poverty in the third world, pure greed and gluttonous abundance in the west, drug epidemics that rival plagues, etc, where all of these things are just as Biblically fucked up as parts of the Bible)). It's my only case for why the Old Testament is quite relevant to understanding the fullness of God. In short, the desire to understand how and why God would work in this way leads me to consider the entirety of the Bible, beginning to end.
Fun topic!
Yes, but the Gospels are "complete." You obviously gain much by reading the OT before it—not to mention the apocrypha like Enoch and Jubilees which are quoted directly and indirectly in the NT—but the Gospels have the entire "message" contained within them.
My mom grew up in Bangladesh with a classic British education (augmented with Russian works that were popular in the country given the socialist alignment). She speaks English with a heavy accent despite living here for almost 40 years, but will randomly reference great works in conversation. The other day she worked a reference to a greek tragedy into a dig at Pakistanis. I’ve come around to the idea that this isn’t merely a class flex, but rather these works have distilled observations about the human condition as well as building blocks of the society we live in even where we don’t recognize the provenance.
Exactly correct. In reading some highly regarded works two things occurred to me, first that the author had captured into words some fundamental aspect of the human condition. Second was that it's easier to think about something presented as a story than it is when it is presented as an alternative to how you currently think.
If you tell someone there position on some topic is wrong, they will argue with you. If you tell someone a story where the character takes the same position they have and then through experience and personal growth comes to understand how it is wrong. They can come away realizing that they might have it wrong. Great trick when it works.
One contemporary author who often writes fantasy and science fiction on social issues is Steven Brust, and he has a rule that when he puts his personal viewpoints into the mouth of a character, he uses a character whom the reader would have a narrative reason to dislike, which forces him to be honest with himself, and more impartial with the reader.
That is a great technique.
I wish I could experience the feeling of reading The Count of Monte Cristo again
Well, Steven Brust's _The Baron of Magister Valley_ is basically TCoMC w/ the names changed and serial numbers filed off in a fantasy setting.
Also, if you haven't read _The Black Count: Glory, Revolution, Betrayal, and the Real Count of Monte Cristo_ by Tom Reiss I'd strongly recommend that:
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/13330922-the-black-count
thanks for the recs!
Judging from the French movie (with Pierre Niney) I saw last year (which was awesome btw) , and my vague recollection of the book, there's lots of physical skills involved. It's not just an intellectual pursuit, but more like applied science in getting vengeance. Really fun read. Big chunk of social media is self improvement. Stumbled across this guy yesterday and actually gives pretty solid advice.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BYsr2jkf_3A
Point!
Added:
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/803453.The_Sword_and_the...
(which I have a copy of and re-read when I was considering taking up fencing, but my wife demurred)
If your wife isn't happy to see you fencing (which I can understand) you might want to take a look at archery instead? And add this book (which impressed me during my teenage years) to your reading list:
Zen in the Art of Archery - Wikipedia https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zen_in_the_Art_of_Archery
It's a long story, but my wife was fencing at the time.
As regards archery, it's long been an interest of mine:
https://www.goodreads.com/review/list/21394355-william-adams...
You might enjoy the movie "Young Sherlock Holmes" than. If you haven't seen it, great fun. And it ends in a fencing scene like Hamlet.
ah yes, read 100 books, abide by 1,000,000 rules
the proper framework can set you free
> In August 2018, in the last month of my three-month sabbatical, I arrived at the Hamta village in Himachal Pradesh. I rented a one-room cottage, and my caretakers were Dolma Aunty and Kalzang Uncle, a couple well into their 70’s.
I got to this part and realized: I've read this article before in some form.
It's a really common trope to head out to some remote area of Asia and admire how happy people are. There's often a spiritual component to it. I will write the guy a bit of a pass, because he himself is (I think) Indian.
But westerners have been doing stuff like this for ages and prattling on about it - it's kind of a cornerstone of Orientalism. This was actually a plot point in the recent White Lotus season. People rarely go to Appalachia to have these experiences, but you certainly can find people living simple happy lives there. (At least, if they do, nobody publishes those articles - it doesn't fit our preconceived notions of who gets to be enlightened, which is to say it has to be some place far away and people very different than your average Americans)
Not to say there's no value in this article (there is), and it was a fun read at that.
> But westerners have been doing stuff like this for ages and prattling on about it - it's kind of a cornerstone of Orientalism. This was actually a plot point in the recent White Lotus season. People rarely go to Appalachia to have these experiences, but you certainly can find people living simple happy lives there.
I think you're moralizing over a pretty bland bit of psychology: people need to be shaken from their frame of reference to see different parts of the world. Even if they exist next door. For many Americans, Appalachia will be too close to home to force off the blinders.
I've flown all over the US for work, and in every location found the same exact city. It's hard to take away someone's footing when they feel at home. OTOH, the preconditions that gave me many life broadening experiences within 100 miles of a single US city are not available to everyone.
Assigning someone internal character traits so that their external practice of respectful travel can still be judged is cruel.
> I've flown all over the US for work, and in every location found the same exact city.
I think you can find the exact same city if you like but I also have found much more. Simply LA and NY are very different places, as are different communities in those cities.
Agreed. I think beyond tourist voyeurism, there is something really maturing(?) about being inserted into a completely different culture where people seem to be content. I grew up in rural Wisconsin and even the micro-change of moving away for college in a place like St. Louis had very important implications for my worldview.
As someone from the US who's traveled all over the country for fun, I can assure you there are loads of delightfully unique places and rich communities that think and act quite differently from each other.
But yes I could see how work travel only could make them feel like carbon copies - both from the mindset you'd be in and from the types of places you might only go for work.
Places you go for work are mostly corporate parks in the suburbs. Of course they all feel the same. I had the same experience and that was why - rarely did I get to visit the big cities. I went to places which had Chili's and Target and Outback Steakhouse.
On the odd times I visited DC or SF or Toronto - really amazing and different experiences.
Both the DC and SF metro areas have Chili's, Target, and Outback. Can you articulate what made DC and SF "really amazing and different experiences" from one another, beyond vibes? Asking as an American who's pretty sure it's all the same here (and has traveled internationally to places where it's not).
I'll try. YMMV, but:
DC:
You can get just about any kind of food - because just about every culture in the world is represented. You can find some of the more home-y type menu options too for the same reason. For example, Greek restaurants where I am at don't generally have Taramosalata (carp roe dip). Due to the shorter flights to Africa, the is a much larger African population in the DC area. One trip, I bought some Nigerian movies at a gas station. Then there's all the historical stuff - tomb of the unknown soldier, Vietnam wall, Air & Space Museum, etc. As I wandered around town on one of my early trips there, I keep seeing things I thought were very familiar - and it turns out at least some were because Bethesda (HQ'd nearby) had done an awesome job recreating apocalypse versions of them in Fallout 3 (which I played a lot of).
SF:
I went cycling a few times with a friend of mine. We went over the Golden Gate bridge, which was amazing. Also to the top of some mountain (big hill?) overlooking the city. What a view! I like to fish, and dropped a line near my hotel and caught a leopard shark. I saw an old Japanese homeless man wheel a little red wagon on a pier near the Mozilla HQ (near the many-billion dollar company I was visiting), and catch a pile of Jacksmelt using a spark plug as a sinker. There is a lot of excellent Asian-influenced dining options - my personal favorite is Lilo Lilo Yacht Club. I got to see a tent city of what appeared to be techies - all really nice huge family-sized tents, well dressed and apparently happy and well fed. One time, I was having a drink in a bar in SFO, and chatted up a guy who had just come from an executive meeting with a bunch of VP's and CTO's of Sony, where chewed them out about their usage of Kubernetes. I saw a shirtless man walking around with what appeared to be pony boots? I assume part of the gay scene.
Now - you may not like all that, but you are not generally having those experiences near suburban corporate parks. Yes, they have Outback Steakhouses, but they have rather a lot more going on.
Hmm, thanks for going into detail. My point wasn't so much that you can experience everything a city has to offer in a corporate park. It was more that most US cities offer roughly the same things.
I know I can get Greek and Asian food in both St. Louis and Denver. I just confirmed that both cities have Greek places with Taramosalata; I know from dating a Chinese girl for a year that both of those cities have extremely authentic Asian places. I've seen gay men walking around in at least Denver and Calgary (not even US).
Now, being able to browse and buy a Nigerian movie at a gas station instead of needing to get it online is something that might qualify if it's truly exclusive to DC. The techie "tent city" in California is probably unique to California, you've got me on that one.
Having visited plenty of U.S. history/military/science/etc museums across several midwestern/western states, those could probably be argued either way. On one hand, of course every museum will have different artifacts/exhibits/etc that mean it's not quite the same at every one, and there are individual facts that you could learn at one but not another. On the other hand, I think the likelihood of coming across something in a US museum that noticeably expands my human experience is lower than the likelihood of that happening in another continent's museums.
Well if it is the unique things, there is still many unique things in the big cities. If you are discounting the vibe, I guess I understand why you are disappointed. The vibe is a big part of what makes big cities feel so distinctive.
If you think DC is samey, maybe your expectations around uniqueness are higher than your average person's. Lol. I have not gone out drinking (much) there, but I would wager it would not take long to end up with insane stories about people you read about in the news.
There are actually no Chili's or Outback or Applebee's or most national chains you can think of in San Francisco. You said "metro area", I have no idea what this means in this context given most people like the city itself, not the sprawling strip mall towns on the peninsula which is not San Francisco. The city limits are pretty well defined here.
Rather reminds me of Pratchetts character Lu-Tze, who having seen so many travel to the monasteries to achieve enlightenment decides to travel to Ankh Morpork and learns many ancient wisdoms ('Is it not written "Oo, you are so sharp you'll cut yourself one of these days."?')
It’s a common trope among urban Indians. They’re enamoured by the simple and rustic living of the villages and think of them as noble savages.
I grew up in rural India and I always recommend people to read Dr. Ambedkar’s rights on this subject.
Dr. Ambedkar is somebody more people in the United States should know about. I was a briefly involved with the Triratna Buddhist Community and read some of Sangharakshita's writing, and he discusses Ambedkar. Real interesting stuff.
TBH Dr. Ambedkar’s Buddhism is very different from what the other traditions preach. It was an answer to the prevailing jātivada, but unfortunately it didn’t manage to make the dent he envisioned.
I’ve grown up around Navayana and have many friends from Kagyu, Theravada and other traditions.
(All this to say I know Bauddha Dharma intimately)
All part of the great warp and weft. It's a fascinating thing to learn about, how all these traditions intersect.
Seattle, the city I live in, recently became the first to ban caste discrimination. I didn't think much of it at the time, but nowadays maybe there's something to be learned from jātivada, the many forms it comes in, and the response to it. Reading Leslie Feinberg right now, interesting working class perspective.
There’s a difference between casteism and jātivada which is not easy to explain in a short comment. Ambedkar’s “ Annihilation of Caste” and A.M. Hocart’s works provide interesting insight on it.
Hamta isn't even really rural. It's a bunch of homestays just outside of Manali, and is similar to Pahalgam.
My family is from rural HP/JK/Ladakh, and a homestay like Hamta is not representative of rural HP/JK/LA/UK.
> They’re enamoured by the simple and rustic living of the villages and think of them as noble savages
I think it goes both ways. They either over-idealize it, or overly berate it.
I feel it's also state dependent to a certain extent, with some states better at rural administrative capacity (eg. Kerala, HP, PB, JK) than others (eg. KA, TG, GJ).
Something I've noticed is states that don't have a primary city tend to have slightly better rural administrative capacity, as it at least incentivizes small town or T3/4 economies to develop instead of being invested in a single mega city.
Thanks for adding extra context. I wasn’t aware of Hamta. My experience is in rural central and South India but I’ve travelled extensively in Garhwal. How different would you say rural JK/HP/LA/UK is?
Your last para rings true. Goa, Kerala, CG and Odisha have better rural administration than MH, TL or KA because of the absence of heavyweight cities.
> How different would you say rural JK/HP/LA/UK is?
Rural UK is much poorer than rural HP and JK.
The administrative structure of UK is very top heavy (everything is decided in Dehradun), and Dehradun+Haridwar have caused tourism and real estate induced Dutch Disease to arise. JK and HP also have a tourism economy, but also have a strong industrial base (pharma in HP, heavy industry in JK) plus more investment in higher value rural industries like food processing and fruit cultivation.
HP and JK also have a bottom up political culture with panchayats in a district coalescing into District Planning Committee that includes state civil service cadre and the MLA, so local governance is much more responsive, and has the resources and capacity to invest in infra like cold storage or make the case for an MNC to invest in manufacturing.
Basically, if local government and administration is actually given priority beyond haphazard panchayats, it makes it easier to attract build industries and a semi-industrial rural economy.
> Kerala, CG and Odisha have better rural administration than MH, TL or KA because of the absence of heavyweight cities.
Political culture is also more top-down in states like MH/TG/KA, where the CM office tends to have inordinate control over local planning and panchayat+local government funding is minimal
Even if their administrations had some interest in rural economic development (which in those states they don't), they wouldn't even have the bandwidth because there are too many districts. This is why local government needs to be invested in by states, but locals are the ones who know best about their needs and capabilities.
JK's interesting history from partition onward has definitely biased its political culture to inspiring bottom-up, panchayat-forward governance.
Great comment, thank you for sharing it. I’ve seen some of it in Garhwal where villages didn’t get proper attention by the Govt. We keep forgetting that states in India are akin to states in Europe.
A modern version of Gram Swaraj combined with Switzerland type canton system might work well but there are no incentives for the administration for that.
I'm not sure a canton type system is necessary if the Gram Swaraj system sees further investment and is coupled with delimitation for legislative assemblies, it would solve most of the pressing problems.
A lopsided population to MLA ratio makes it easier for MLAs to be disconnected from local government, and incentivizes governance through internal party machinery (beg the CM or the local party leadership to get your MLA or DM to do something) instead of via the local administration, which further deprofessionalizes local government.
> We keep forgetting that states in India are akin to states in Europe.
Pretty much. Even within states the diversity is insane (eg. MP, KA, or UP would be better served split into 3-4 states).
I think that as tropey as such a practice is, there's a fundamental valid reason to do trips of this sort. You want to meet people as culturally remote and distant from you as you think exist, that you are still theoretically comfortable with. Then you want to be assured or refuted directly through your direct senses on things that you think are fundamental to the human condition. From such an experience you gain confidence on what you think is important to life and living.
I agree that this is a common trope but the rest of your comment reads like, "Hey westerners, go find your own rural people and stop appropriating mine".
Also completing your logic loop, this guy is apparently stealing intellectual ideas from (mediocre) westerners.
There’s also some self-selection here.
If you go to another place and someone lets you stay with them, they are probably in a good place in life. You are selecting yourself to meet with happier people.
You won’t be making as many friends with unhappy people.
Well, maybe there's something to it. I think it's great when East meets West. East should keep meeting West over and over and over. Maybe one day East will know West and vice versa.
For what it's worth, I had something of a similar experience, but it was in a plywood shack on a desert island off the coast of California.
A simpler explanation is that Americans have succumbed to consumerism to such an extent that the absence of it feels enlightened.
Of course the reality is just that the US has become the axis of evil, and perhaps always was, it just had the best PR.
I think you're doing yourself a disservice by belitting Asian cultures and what insights they may have, that are apparently incomprehensible as more than a trope to Americans.
> Of course the reality is just that the US has become the axis of evil, and perhaps always was, it just had the best PR.
Sigh.
Yes, the Soviet Union really was the worker's paradise with free, prosperous, happy people!
Can we get away from the sophomoric idea the USA was ALWAYS the ONLY source of badness in the world, just because right now it's the most powerful nation in the world and also a complete mess?
I suspect that the communist project has lived under constant fear of the US, that the economy ultimately was bankrupted from having to defend itself against the US war machine.
The US has waged war in virtually every country around the world, for example Afghanistan, Vietnam, and Korea, which were significant threats to both Soviet and China. China has virtually been besieged since the 1950s, with Americans present in Thailand, Philippines, Japan, Taiwan, and South Korea.
How would you feel if the Soviet installed weapons systems in Canada, Hawaii, Mexico, Greenland, and Cuba? And then started a tariff war to hopefully bankrupt your economy?
Wasn't communism influenced heavily by being anti-capitalist? They fundamentally disagreed with the tenants that the United States stood on. Your comment, if I'm understanding it correctly, makes it look like the communists were just trying to do their own thing in their own countries and the big bad U.S came in and bullied them out of existence.
I'm not defending either sides here. I'm not a Reaganot. But to think most communist regimes were not hellbent on the destruction of western capitalism would seem a bit misleading to me.
That is fair; I think the reality is nuanced and that different opinions existed at the same time and were warring internally in the Soviet Union. In particular, IIUC, Trotsky thought that "a socialist revolution must spread internationally to succeed and cannot be confined to one nation" (OpenAI) - but he was also assassinated by Stalin's order, and the assassin was honored by Brezhnev. Stalin was assassinated as well.
It's a great tragedy if they felt threatened by capitalism, and capitalism by communism, in a self-perpetuating way that could have been avoided.
But I would argue that capitalism has its roots in aristocracy, imperialism, and private ownership (i.e. slavery, colonialism, and systemic exploitation), to an extent that it is fair to say that capitalism cannot co-exist with communist ideals.
But yes, European countries were heavily influenced by communist ideology, which continues to shape our values today, about well-regulated free markets, fair taxation, public service, and so on, which directly threatened capitalist interests, and arguably that's why we're seeing a rise in fascism, in an attempt to remove these communist ideals.
To be clear, I am confused on this matter, but I do think that the Europeans have been foolish to follow US doctrine for the last 50 years (since Reagan/Thatcher), and especially the last 10-20 years have been devastating on virtually every sector of the economy.
> But yes, European countries were heavily influenced by communist ideology, which continues to shape our values today, about well-regulated free markets, fair taxation, public service, and so on
So this is the first time I've seen well-regulated free markets and fair taxation as being associated with communist ideology. Granted, I'm not well-studied here, but I recall being taught quite the opposite.
I did some preliminary research uisng Gemini Research to see if I could surface anything that might suggest this has been universally regarded as true and it came back with the opposite on the first (well-regulated free markets) and ambiguity on the second (not universally associated with communism).
Would you be able to reference a place where I can learn more about these relationships?
Damn, in 2025 the USSR is still an excuse for the US? x) Come on.
Saying that US-exported consumerism is a blight on the world is a perfectly valid thing to say. No need to invoke "the Reds" to pretend it's not.
America is the best because citizens can do basically whatever they want all the time. The latest complaints are people took it too far (rampant drug use, camping on sidewalks, and shitting everywhere in San Francisco, etc.).
But if you want to buy a rural cabin on a beautiful mountain, it’s available, and cheap. You don’t need to go to Asia to live like a hermit.
> America
Obviously America refers to the continent, so I'll use the shorthand country name "the US" instead.
> is the best
That may be true, but I do wonder if it was a lucky accident. What if the Irish famine hadn't happened? What if WW2 had been averted (but maybe the EU wouldn't exist...).
> rural cabin
That's nice, but what value is it if the forest burns down, the lake is polluted, the wild life is dead, and there's nothing left but neighboring land full of fracking wells? Glory to god.
You just have no idea how incredibly enormous and empty the US is
And yet, every viable plot of land is used for farming.
Similarly, I would argue that you should not underestimate the harmful and wide-reaching effects of industry.
>every viable plot of land is used for farming.
It is? Not in the US!
Ehh US farmland usage has been dropping for many decades. That said, it is only because we are more than ever reliant upon fossil fuel derived fertilizer and over utilize a lot of arid/desert farming
The America's have the 'noble savage' trope to find enlightenment with. It became so blatantly co-opting anothers' religion that many Native American tribes still refuse to teach non-tribal members there spiritual practices.
Just because you can prove mathematically that most link chains "end" at "philosophy" doesn't mean that's the end you should end up at. I spend at least 2 nights a week just reading links through wikipedia as I'm falling asleep, and I almost inevitably end up at languages and cultures or historical events that I knew little about. Philosophy isn't an end, and it's pretty meaningless without some stone cold knowledge about the world. Or you could say it comes as a result of knowledge, not before it.
personally I believe that
philosophy helps to "compress" more knowledge about the world into "less" knowledge by shifting quantity of data into difficulty from advanced conceptual abstractions
Unfortunately it is also a very lossy compression. Often so much so that it renders the knowledge useless or even actively harmful.
This is a fucking brilliant observation!
Thank you.
Nothing ends at philosophy. They reach there, but they can reach lots of different places. Without scrolling on philosophy I can see more than 50 other links from that page that are thus reachable from anywhere by at most one more step.
Pick a random thing and see if it is reachable from anywhere. A lot of them are. I suspect most are, but I don't know how to run this study (other than a brute force algorithm that will use more compute than I would want to dedicate)
Philosophy is like math for humanities.
I think you’d be interested in Tolstoy’s view of “Philosophy”, which he expresses in “Confession / What I Believe”.
Basically that the reason why philosophy is cold and meaningless is because it tries to separate itself from the source of meaning, which is intrinsically subjective and physical and spiritual.
Philosophy’s logical conclusions are relativism and nihilism (or at least they were in Tolstoy’s time? I’m not a philosopher), because they try to understand the world with a pretext that denies its vitality.
Common folk / common sense frown on these forms of philosophy, because they miss the point in a sense; they don’t actually tell you how to live in a moral way. Tolstoy thought intellectuals grossly underrated the perspective of folk wisdom in that way. We’ve made some progress in that department, since his time, but it’s still largely true today.
> Philosophy’s logical conclusions are relativism and nihilism
Some philosophers, notably Jacobi [1], have argued this (he is credited with popularizing the term nihilism). He was arguing against enlightenment thinkers, especially Spinoza and Kant (and the rest of German Idealism). But one philosopher's conjecture isn't equal in any sense to some unequivocal stance of "Philosophy". It is worth noting, that he was arguing for "Faith" instead of speculative reason, so maybe not what you would think.
So your point is true in a very limited sense. Some philosophers have argued against some particular philosophies by suggesting that the particular philosophy they are criticizing is likely to lead to relativism and nihilism.
1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Friedrich_Heinrich_Jacobi
I tried this for awhile, but was dissatisfied. I found myself a constant consumer of intellectual material instead of being an engaged participant. Once I realized that, I set course to become more of a producer of useful things. That's led me to woodworking, to running a consultancy, to producing AI/ML for nonprofits, and to writing academic works. All in all, I enjoy life substantially.
Years ago I realized that if I bluntly categorize the things I do with my free time into buckets of "productive" and "consumptive" it's the productive things that make me feel pretty great.
I think this is a common viewpoint, because no one wants to say "yeah, being a consumer makes me feel pretty great" publicly. But arguably most people fall into that camp. Even someone who lives an intellectually rich life.
It’s also not exclusive. Different phases of life yield different productivity levels.
“Anyone who reads poetry to improve their mind will never improve their mind by reading poetry.” CS Lewis.
My very brief stint into woodworking and machining gave me a lifetime of looking at random objects from really close. Seeing how things are manufactured makes you look at every man-made object differently. It gives you a rare appreciation for craftsmanship and clever engineering. There are whole museum sections that have suddenly opened up to me.
I credit a few YouTube channels for creating the spark: The Engineer Guy, This Old Tony, AvE, Pask Makes, Xyla Foxlin to name a few.
I find consumer vs producer to be very interesting and useful distinction. Sometimes very enlightening and somewhat scary when applied to personal time spending.
Pairing production and consumption can be very satisfying. Some personal examples:
- Cooking a novel dish, then eating it
- Setting up a music server, then listening to music with it
- (With friends) Making a pen-and-paper game, then playing it
One might argue that everything we produce lends itself to some kind of consumption. Moreover, not all actions lead to tangible "products", but they can lead to useful results and experiences. Sports and games are an example.
Perhaps production tends towards consumption but not the opposite. If I make music I'll probably listen to it. But I can easily listen to music without making it.
And agree sports are an interesting example. It kind of fits my mental model of consumption in many ways: something you do that's primary effect transforms you. Watching TV, playing a game, etc. The effect being something chemical that is satisfying. I guess with sports or exercise the internal change is more physical (muscle, endurance, etc) vs chemical. Although I suppose you are acting on the world as well - you are scoring a point or advancing a position. It's just more ephemeral (ends when game ends) and arbitrary.
Im sure even just in terms of chemical reactions there is going to be a clean split between stuff like playing video games or watching TV vs. sports, building something, etc. Dopamine vs... ?
Absolutely agree!
this. folks just end up being smarmy snobs about what is universal truth when the goal should be leveraging this knowledge to produce new things/ideas
I've been trying to create/produce more but I'm stuck in the consumption mindset. I can't think of what to create. How did you decide what useful things to produce?
In my youth, I read many books, and I still have many unread ones on the shelf. But, eventually, realized that, you only understand what you can create (to paraphrase feynman), and also that, what it means to be curious is to start from a burning problem or itch which differs for each one of us based on something deeper in our psyche.
Productive activities put us often into uncomfortable mental places which spurs growth of some kind - the discomfort is difficult to embrace however, which is why we resist it. In contrast, the consumptive activity comes out of a comfortable mental place and is embraced easily.
So, a question I ask myself is: what problems am i passionate about, and what am i doing (productively) about them. If I dont feel any passion, then perhaps, something is amiss (I am not communicating with my soul so-to-speak), and if I am not doing anything about them, then I need to get my ass moving and embrace the discomfort.
Do you need something? Make it - it doesn't matter what. Quality doesn't even matter, if the shoes you make turn out well you wear them, if not well go to the store and buy some. If you decide you like making shoes then make some more. If you decide it isn't fun then find something else (and come back again if you later change your mind).
See someone else make something, try to do it yourself. Sometimes you get something nice, sometimes you have fun and then throw away the worthless object.
There are a few danger signs to watch out for. Don't get caught up in learning how - you can spend the rest of your life watching "how to make a guitar" videos and never build anything. You can spend a lot of money on tools, or think you cannot do something for lack of tools - for the first one figure out how to use minimal tools (not zero!) so you don't get invested in a hobby you turn out not to enjoy - the big bucks should be only after you are sure the hobby and the tool is for you. You can start with a project too complex - start with small projects you can get done - take on the complex ones only after you are sure this hobby is for you.
Question for you: does creating mean building something? Do you count playing music as creating? What about art? What about dancing? There is no right answer to these questions except whatever you decide.
I divide my time into 4 sets.
Based on an area of interest I:
1. Find interesting people or projects that are interesting (discovery)
2. Identify the things I don't know how to do yet, or where I don't have enough information (information consumption with plan as output)
3. Execute on the plan (creation and delivery)
4. Evaluate on the outcomes -- modified ikigai is the framework I use: (1) does the world need it? (2) what is the world willing to pay for it? (3) did I enjoy it? (4) could I be good at it
Consumption is addictive - even or all the more so when we feel we are consuming worthwhile stuff (see the various major reading projects here). A useful first step is awareness of the time spent on the various time sinks: we have limited time and sinking all that available time in one thing kills that. So then, diversification away from the worst bits. Even if temporarily that means still consuming.
A second step is understanding the taste vs skill gap: unless what you produce is related to your job or training, when you start creating things your skill is poor (and your equipment probably not adapted) and it's hard to be satisfied with the quality of what you are creating. You can create something related to your job skills, or you can recognize that skill gap is a normal thing and persevere. Some classes though are excellent at carrying someone a long way in a short time.
> Consumption is addictive
So is production! Even more so, I guess.
Would love to hear more! We rarely hear stories of people "stuck" on the making/ creative side. Exciting yes - but rarely addictive in the sense of taking so much time that the rest suffers?
It's common enough that there's a well-known term for it: workaholic.
For work work, I don't think this is what we were talking about.
But yes, not unfair, one example then might be some free software maintainers.
Typically, production requires some consumption. At a base level, however, the outcomes can be guided, satisfying my ego and leaving my mark on the universe.
Here are some suggestions: Writing, music creation, woodworking, drawing, painting, photography, podcasting, gardening, cooking, DIY home projects, chess, sports
>I can't think of what to create. How did you decide what useful things to produce?
What you like to consume.
I agree. Knowledge-seeking can become a defense or excuse not to take action. I think it can be enriching, particularly when young, but there's a balance in everything.
Not sure about the intellectual part of it, but how to live a rich life? Surely not by secretly cherishing a feeling of superiority and sophistication because these sentiments will cut you out of a lot of insights and encounters that make your life rich. True, life is a farce in a lot of ways, but who cares? Accept it where you can't change it and find your own islands of happiness. These may be intellectual if you like, but don't expect the people around you to follow the same (high) standards, that will only make you unhappy.
Good insight about how feelings of 'superiority' or 'sophistication' can suck the joy out of life. I fell into this trap myself, and it took a long time to get out of it.
That said, there are times when a certain type of appreciation of 'sophistication' is warranted - you just shouldn't use it to believe you are therefore above other people, or beyond the simple pleasures of life.
Superiority and sophistication might ironically make you less curious and appreciative.
This is interminable and appears to be a disaster of mixed self-help metaphors and embarrassingly naive writing -- a TED-talk blog post, though TED talks mercifully have a length limit.
I personally found this very tedious to read and hard to follow. The author veered into weird unrelated tangents and came across of too self indulgent at times. I would rather read Seneca or Cicero instead of this.
Came here to say the same. Excessive writing itself is a form of self indulgence and comes across as sloppy.
Conciseness is really undervalued. Long and meandering is okay for a personal journal or diary, but if you're sharing it with the world, be concise.
This is a little meandering so just to focus on one part:
Philosophy can be valuable, but applying the ideas meaningfully requires discernment. I’m thinking particularly about the popularity of “Meditations”, for example.
Take Plato, for example: He and his also-famous mentor believed knowledge was a form of recollection from past lives, an idea illustrated with an unconvincing geometry lesson in Phaedo (EDIT: It’s Meno).
Sure, it’s worth stepping back to reassess what’s going to increase your “PC” to borrow from seven habits. That could involve leaving behind surface-level achievement in favor of deeper reflection, as the referenced article suggests.
But let’s not overly-romanticize ancient thinkers: Plato and Aristotle held fundamentally different views on knowledge. Even they couldn’t agree; there’s no need to treat any one of them as infallible.
Philosophy is just one of the liberal arts. This idea has declined in popularity in recent years but I still think there's a lot to be said for possessing a liberal arts education. If you have a good one your understanding of the world around you gets broader and deeper. You recognize why things are the way they are. In the long term you may spot opportunities you wouldn't have otherwise, or be able to solve problems that would have seemed intractable. Maybe most importantly you end up developing a sophisticated moral framework that's grounded in history and all the things that eventually led up to you existing and living the life you live.
You don't have to major in a liberal art or even go to college to get one, you can just read books. You also don't have to learn it all in your early 20s. You can just incorporate the great works into what you read throughout your adult life. It's very easy to find lists and recommendations online for what you should read if you want a broad-based liberal education. The general idea is simply to be informed about and understand the foundational concepts in philosophy, economics, political science, psychology, history, sociology, law, and so on. There is no need to go deep in any one them, unless you find it interesting and wish to do so. Someone who reads one or two foundational works in each of these subjects will have a wildly better understanding of the world than someone who doesn't. To me this is what living an intellectually rich life is and it's very rewarding. If nothing else, due to my liberal arts education I will never be bored in retirement, there are thousands of books that I would find it interesting to read.
I don’t have a problem with having a good understanding of classics (liberal arts is a category that far encompasses more than just classical education, though).
I do have a problem with blindly assuming Plato/other ancient philosophers were some sort of omniscient super-intelligence we should blindly follow, which I do see happen with some regularity in my own life.
Plato et al might’ve been the start of our modern understanding of ethics, but the concept of a moral life or epistemology certainly didn’t stop with him!
> Philosophy is just one of the liberal arts. This idea has declined in popularity in recent years but I still think there's a lot to be said for possessing a liberal arts education. If you have a good one your understanding of the world around you gets broader and deeper.
Look no further than all the AI debates on HN: from the perspective of someone with a couple of college classes on philosophy (not even a minor), it’s looks like a bunch of five years olds debating particle physics. Complete ignorance of what the academic precedent is, retreading ideas that philosophers have moved on from hundreds of years ago.
Yes, people are going to be ignorant of things they haven't studied previously. So, people exploring the ideas and debating them for the first time might look amateur to you, but why is that a bad thing?
This is a social media site; people can shoot the shit about whatever they want and there’s nothing wrong with that.
But… what’s the point? It’s like going into a thread about modern chemistry and debating about the four basic elements of ancient Greece. Sure you can have fun shooting the shit about what is essentially a historical novelty, but if you really want to debate about chemistry you need to open a high school textbook and get up to speed on at least the first few chapters.
The only difference is that nerds look down at philosophy and not chemistry; and the former is rarely taught in high school after which the arrested development seems to set in. No one blinks an eye telling flat earthers that they don’t know what they’re talking about.
I believe the point was this is preventable by having a slightly wider knowledge base.
Wont discussing these things widen their knowldege base?
Possibly, but slowly and inefficiently.
Why shouldnt people on a message forum explore "ideas that philosophers moved on from hundreds of years ago?" It seems to suggest philosophy is more about the conclusions than the process. I cant think of an academic field where that is less true.
>If you have a good one your understanding of the world around you gets broader and deeper.
The problem is, is it _unique_ to liberal arts? That is what must be true to give it some purpose. If you can just read a bunch of books or study something else with additional positive benefits why do liberal arts?
I am a liberal arts and computer science degree holder. I don't think liberal arts is _worthless_. I do think its a terrible value proposition and that the positive side effects can be achieved while studying something far more marketable. Computer science has made me a much stronger general problem solver and a better critical thinker than liberal arts did. These are the primary skills touted by the liberal arts.
> Philosophy can be valuable, but applying the ideas meaningfully requires discernment. I’m thinking particularly about the popularity of “Meditations”, for example.
From one translation of Meditations (I forget which), and from memory, so I may have it slightly wrong:
"You can live your life in a calm flow of happiness, if you learn to think the right way, and to act the right way".
The act the right way is the hard part. The frame-of-mind stuff that lots of people focus on is necessary, but not sufficient. On its own it can be of some help, but it can also lead to traps like going too easy on one's own deficiencies of action. The thinking bits that get most of the attention, at least in stoicism, are largely reactive—the acting is proactive, as is the thinking to support it (which gets less attention in popular takes on Stoicism, and is harder).
Meditations is particularly interesting because it’s clearly just Marcus Aurelius’s diary that was doubtfully ever meant to see the light of day.
He spends a fair amount of it repeating mantras to himself over and over again, or even arguing with himself in stream-of-consciousness.
It’s Marcus Aurelius giving himself a written pep talk. He struggles to uphold those stoicism ideals his whole life, failing constantly ant it, and Meditations is an artifact of it.
There's also an awful lot of really boring and silly Stoic physics and metaphysics in there, which topics for some reason people who love the book rarely bring up, LOL.
>But let’s not overly-romanticize ancient thinkers: Plato and Aristotle held fundamentally different views on knowledge.
1) everyone agrees “overly” Romanticizing is wrong. By definition of “overly”.
2) why should having a fundamentally different view on knowledge disqualify something from being romanticized? Isnt romanticizing precisely for things that are different?
3) i think its a mischaracterization to say Plato thought “ knowledge was a form of recollection from past lives.” He was not talking about “past lives” but the “soul” (which I think wed both agree is a loaded term). He said the soul knew it before the person was born. This goes to his theory on the forma which I think is a better way to characterize his thoughts on knowledge. In general terms id say he believes truth exists in a timeless, non-empirical realm (the Forms). With the physical reality being an imperfect imitation. Which people have some mediated access to.
> everyone agrees “overly” is wrong
I mean, apparently not - this author alone takes Plato’s cave allegory at face value without spending even a moment to criticize it.
> I think it’s a mischaracterization…
It is not. Read Meno. Socrates thought this, and has a very painful example of trying to prove it. Plato thought the exact same.
The example he gives about geometry is actually quite interesting. It is one of the early highlights of a deep question: is this knowledge, geometry in this case, learned/learnable or is it, somehow, innate? Do we learn this from scratch or do we have innate pre-existing cognitive structures that are “configured” by experience? If the latter, what does “learning” mean? It’s definitely not what we usually mean. If the former, we meet Hume and Kant and have to show how we arrived at space and geometry ex nihilo.
If learning is essentially based on “configuring” innate structures, you can IMO state it is eternal or uncovered or whatever poetic vehicle you desire. I’d say give these pre-modern guys a break.
These are issues being discussed way into the modern era starting (again) with the likes of Hume and Kant and no easy solutions are available. This is not a solved problem.
Is math invented or discovered?
I think most people’s intuition is that the methodology and conventions are invented but are constrained by some transcendental reality. It seems difficult to argue its instead purely natural or purely convention.
This is very much inline with Platos theory of the forms. I dont really understand the idea that Plato’s ideas are dated.
> I mean, apparently not - this author alone takes Plato’s cave allegory at face value without spending even a moment to criticize it.
Does HE say hes over romanticizing it? No.
He would probably argue hes not over-romanticizing it. So the question isnt if over-romanticizing is improper (which is true by definition of “over”). The question is if he actually is over romanticizing.
>It is not. Read Meno. Socrates thought this, and has a very painful example of trying to prove it. Plato thought the exact same.
Im not contesting that Plato believed in reincarnation. But its not true that he thought knowledge comes from "past lives" (as in when you were previously some other person). He believed the _soul_ had direct access to knowledge. In a past life you would have only had an impression as well. This is all downstream of his actual theory of the forms though. Why not attack that if you want to attack his theory of knowledge.
The dialogue you refer to is Meno and the idea is a solution to “Meno’s Paradox”.
Thanks, that is what I was thinking of.
I like How To Think Like a Roman Emperor's analysis of Meditations but maybe it falls into pop self-help/psychology, it discusses the history around the text and how modern psychology has similarities with some of the techniques and aphorisms.
Here's how I would put this: reading the classics can be valuable, but if you want to become wise you need philosophy.
Philosophy isn't a set of ideas or texts. It's a practice.
> Take Plato, for example: He and his also-famous mentor believed knowledge was a form of recollection from past lives, an idea illustrated with an unconvincing geometry lesson in Phaedo (EDIT: It’s Meno).
I find the line of thought in "Meno" extremly impressiv. Let me try to reformulate it in modern terms.
The literary form of a dialogue emphasizes that the thoughts of the participants should not be considered as doctrines, but the whole as an investigation of a problem domain.
The dialogue starts with a distinction between empirical knowledge ("The way to Larisa") and mathematical knowledge. Empirical knowledge is something that I cannot know from introspection. In contrast, the nature of mathematical knowledge comes from inside the mind. This is demonstrated by an uneducated, but smart child (a slave boy). The child is guided to discover a mathematical insight by questions alone. At first the boy does not know the right answer to an initial question. Then Socartes starts again with a simple question the boy is able to answer. Then a sequence of other questions follows each building on the previous answers. Socrates only questions, the boy only answers. Finally the boy arrives at the correct answer of the initial question whose answer he did not know at the start.
This scene should demonstrate the essence of mathematical proof. First we do not know the answer of a mathematical problem. Step-by-step we clarify our understanding, until we arrive at an answer. At this stage we know whether the particular mathematical statement is true or false. We expanded our understanding by only just thinking. In one way it is new knowledge (we now know something we did not, when we looked for a proof), in another way the knowledge was always there, just hidden in our mind.
At this point Socrates hits a limit where he runs out of questions to invistigate this further. This is when he starts to tell a story (the greek word for story is "myth"). Such stories are just tools to further investigate a problem when purely theoretical thoughts come to an end. In the dialogue it is also accompanied by a lot of joking, and "let me speculate" and "don't take it too serious" sort of remarks. So he reminds his fellows about some old stories (that he adapts and decorates a little to match the problem) about reincarnation where one looses the memory of one's past life but has occasionally some sort of flashbacks. This is more or less the whole point of the story: Perhaps we should think of mathematical knowledge as analogous to memory, but in a in a transcendent way.
Our modern doctrins are not very much off: Our ability of mathematical thinking is something that is inherent to us, more specifically to our brains. The blueprint (a sort of memory?) for our brains are in our genes. This way we are a sort of reincarnation of our parents, but in a state were we have to undergo all the mathematical training again.
What Plato lacks is a theory of evolutionary epistemology. But this is a really new development.
Seek movement .Move towards discomfort. Settle only in your values, never in loyalties or kinship. Be homeless in regards to ideologies, be merciless to those that subvert what your values brought about , be subversive to all things to see the brittleness of things.
Disregard detected retardations in yourself, invest your lifes work in little turtles crawling towards abilities up the scenario tree. Do not attach, to fortresses, kings and nations built on those branches.
This reads like someone accidentally posted their Linkedin motivational slop on HN.
Ah it's just romantic; let's not be so harsh. LinkedIn would be so lucky to get a post like this.
Polonius. You forgot "never a borrower nor a lender be".
Polonius was famously wrong about everything.
nah..do whatever the fuck you want.
I have been wondering lately if "intellectually rich" can be found solely in books.
I read Jim Stanford's Economics for Everyone, and he recommends to go out and talk to people and see what problems they are having in life.
That's not to say that long time dead philosophers cannot give good insights, but I feel that looking at other people's problems (especially in different cultures) is a lot more relevant for understanding the world.
I think one of the advantages of reading very old material is a) it's not bogged down by modern ideology, b) imparting the realization that some human issues and ideas have been around a very long time (see for instance dialogues in Thucydides History of the Peloponnesian War), b) some ideas and insights have a timelessness to them. Take for instance the Tao Te Ching. I found it retains influential power, despite my not being completely on board.
The author seems to favor episteme (theoretical knowledge, sought for its own sake) over techne (application of knowledge in a craft).
I find the latter far more intellectually rich and rewarding.
As with nearly anything, an obsessive pursuit of knowledge, simple living, or 'enlightenment' to the exclusion of other things can be very harmful.
We should be constantly exposing ourselves to new ideas and exploring new avenues; but diving down a rabbit hole for a years-long journey is not the way.
Sitting in a mountain shack trying to digest the best 100 (or 1000) books ever written, might yield some real benefits; but at what cost?
I don't think this article is encouraging the reader to obsess on the pursuit of knowledge at the expense of family, work, or personal happiness.
That is my conception of the world that we all have different interests and cognitive functions. Also, call it serenpidity, synchronicity, fate or luck, but as this article showed, the best ideas come from places you could never have expected.
Read about the discovery of LSD if you haven't, it's one of the perfect example of this.
So you have to find your nature, the garden of iteas that resonates with you. For that, just read. From any topic that interests you and sometimes, dare to read something you would never do. Comics, mangas, niche recipes, biographies, romance, everything is fair game and you never know, sometimes you might just click on something you never might otherwise.
In the age of Wikipedia, kindles and libraries, you really have no excuse to not indulge in your curiosity.
For all we know, we could ever be "hard-coded" to love certain topics more than others(https://www.europeanscientist.com/en/research/the-way-we-app...). Maybe in the future, a drop of saliva would be enough to know if you should study architecture or dancing ?
The universe is a cruel, uncaring void. The key to being happy isn’t a search for meaning, it’s to just keep yourself busy with unimportant nonsense, and eventually you’ll be dead. - BoJack Horseman
A lot of passion was put into this article. I appreciate that. And I do think that there are several huge themes that need to be periodically grappled with.
Just to pick one, the ego hit when jumping into a new field is real (I'm currently immersed in math & ML from a CS background). It's one of the things that I feel is least talked about. It's very easy to peak in a field and then rest on your laurels. Despite being particularly willing to start at the bottom, I also identify as "being smart," and getting schooled by 22 year olds stings.
But the rewards for "owning" two peaks are so huge, and much of the process is so satisfying.
I wouldn't advise this as a life goal. Better to live an intentional live. I am sure people can come up with even better formulations.
This stirs up a good discussion. My way of having a satisfying intellectual life is not just by juggling many ideas, but also by problem solving. I find immense satisfaction in making something work or creating something that didn't exist before. Many times, this requires problem solving with creativity, compromise and tradeoffs. Some times, it requires deep diving into academic papers and doing some math. When this ends up working it is truly a triumphant feeling; however it might sometimes not work at all.
Another thing is meeting and absorbing knowledge from other people. It's incredible to learn or even just watch skillful people do their thing.
I enjoyed this article.
I am confused though how this was a difficult problem to begin with, particularly with the internet. It is not exactly hard to find intellectually stimulating concepts if that's what gets you off.
I also find "philosophy" to be a pretty miserable and unrewarding topic to think about, and I tend to run quickly away from those who want to talk about it. I find it very curious that the author finds it to be a natural place for your focus to land. I think this is a red herring: the secret to long-term contentment is not thinking at all if it's not strictly necessary. Aristotle got "contemplation is the greatest good" dead wrong.
The first precept of anti-philosophy philosophy is,
Philosophy as a concept isn't an issue; but we tend to romanticize the tendency to neurotically examine even when we know finding "truth" isn't possible, and I've noted a tendency in people so devoted to unconsciously emotionally attach to what are ultimately word games. This concerns me. Perhaps we should instead romanticize living a contented existence, some of which will surely still involve reading and discussing philosophy (in moderation, of course).
Read Nobel Literature too young to understand but old enough to remember the stories. Then when "life happens" the meaning of those Nobel Books hits with a physical epiphany and sudden unexpected wisdom is realized.
> Our ideas become Oscillators
it is the muscle working, the tide going back and forth.
i liked reading it, lots of things to unpack, new descriptions of the elephant in the room to absorb.
The conclusion itches me, (sorry for the spoil, readers)
> After all, aren’t we all trying to understand our place in the universe?
are you sure about that ? that "you" are trying to do that, or that, something else works hard on you, much like in those "Goals that are physically, emotionally and economically crushing us"
For those of you who're interested in the Wikipedia Philosophy thing, check out this video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-llumS2rA8I
I didn't have time to get through the whole article today, but I did spend some time with my kids playing the Wikipedia first link game, which we enjoyed. We kept trying to find one that didn't end in Philosophy, and my youngest son said we should try Brick. Sure enough, it ended in a loop consisting of Existence and Reality.
In finance there are some people that say "All roads lead to quantitative finance"
I don't like this answer so here's mine.
"Read. Not too much fiction. Mostly books."
I am still searching for the definition of "Intellectually Rich Life".
There are some compelling and imaginative calls in the article, but can we drop with the metaphors? I rather have the author develop deeper examples, instead of vague focus and practicality.
Maybe because I am not searching for inspiration, but detailed roadmaps.
This whole spiel is a piece of content marketing for a course on creating a newsletter. Pfft.
Surprising how many philosophically literate comments missed that this was an ad.
I was expecting a flowery puff piece but I’m pleasantly surprised at how…helpful? Mindful? This is.
And lengthy, good grief. I’ll be reading this over the weekend.
How to:
Read lots of non-fiction. Whatever interests you.
Try to find overlap over the different interests. Try to find new thoughts there. You might be the first to find them.
Assume everything you know is wrong. It's generally true of >50%.
Hard is best, too hard is bad, too easy is bad.
I think engaging with works of fiction is just as important. Like anything, if a work of fiction engages and challenges you, and you are an intentional reader, it exercises very important muscles.
fiction absolutely can be intellectual. 1984, 451 Fahrenheit, anything dostoevsky or heinlein.
in fact, by adding that intellectualism is what makes these stand out.
But i do specify non-fiction because I wouldnt say most fiction is intellectual; or if you try to approach some fiction you'll quickly dig deeper than what's actually there and then it's just you superimposing.
The example i like is colour metaphors. Shakespeare will say that a character put a green shirt on. You're supposed to say 'thats just a new shirt, not the colour green' but no. It actually really is just the colour green. You cant dig too deep on most fiction.
bend, dont break
True knowledge is to know yourself.
I was initially fairly sceptical of this essay, but getting to the parts about Erdős I find myself more in agreement. The title misled me!
Intellectualism for the sake of intellectualism is a road that leads to isolation. And then, what's the point of it all?
Connection and collaboration is where it's at - which is more or less what the author concludes, although still under the banner of intellectuality. Perhaps my definition of intellect is/was too narrow?
Read HN, of course.
It loops at Existence and Reality.
Logorrhea
Perhaps a more enlightening view is in the book "The Socratic Method," by Ward Farnsworth, who is dean of the UTexas Law School. This is a great book for those just starting on the adulthood road, though it could have been shorter.
It analyzes the dialogs of Socrates with practicality in mind, showing how to question the world around you, question your own beliefs, and question the beliefs of others, all without coming off like a dick (as Socrates often does). Moreover, as related to the OP's article, it tells you precisely how Socrates would have defined an intellectually rich life, and I think Farnsworth is correct.
Farnsworth's Socratic method is about much more than just asking questions. The trite "Know thyself" injunction is seen to be a specific outgrowth of the Socratic method, echoing in some way the OP's claim that everything tracks to philosophy.
Incidentally, the book includes a stunning revelation from Ben Franklin saying that he found the Socratic method to be the best way of getting people to change their mind and do what he wanted. He gave it up, however, because it was too powerful a tool and he decided to adopt instead a more diffident personality, which he found also successful.
I would have thought a book like this would sell about 10 copies, but it has 800 comments on Amazon! [I have no connection with the author or with Amazon.]
I have great difficulty in believing that a real human and not a LLM wrote this. It reads like self-help tripe and is far too long.
I'm not sure about the metaphors. The "Axe of Satisfaction" suggests that some of the ills of late-stage capitalism can be overcome through individual grit alone. Maybe we need to band together and target the root system rather than hacking down individual trees?
Discussing this and its implications in a direct and serious manner is, regrettably, unpalatable in polite company. Few are willing to accept the risk of discussing it openly.
all big talk. feels like a linkedin post
there are 25 comments here now, but none of them yet mention the opening idea of TFA, that if you click the first link you see on wikipedia and lather, rinse, repeat, you will get to philosophy every time.
if true, this is fascinating.
...
i just tried it a few times, and it worked! although the reason seems to be a bit less interesting. biography page: "so and so was a botanist" --> and we're headed to philosophy. "political party" --> decision making. "vehicle ramming attack" --> --> power.
encyclopedias start each page by saying what category something is in, and you inevitably category your way back to, metaphorically speaking, earth, air, fire, or water
I think the explanation is simple: The first link is usually the category of the article's lemma. Or something else which is a more general or abstract word. Following the links you will lead you to the most abstract things and eventually to thinking about abstract things, which is philosophy.
You might find A. G. Sertillanges's "The Intellectual Life" interesting [0].
[0] https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/549384.The_Intellectual_...
Can LLMs achieve intellectual richness?
If living an intellectually rich life is as exhausting as reading this article I want no part of it.
And I truly honestly mean this comment to be more of a thoughtful contribution than my high level of snark makes it sound.
325 points for this nonsense? Oh, HN.
From the title I expected something serious. I gave up halfway, having pigeonholed the pompous verbiage as a first cousin to Women Who Run With The Wolves. But really, the game was up when I read the phrase "late stage capitalism", which is the verbal equivalent of a plague bell, used by halfwits to warn us of their presence.
Friends, here's how to have an intellectually rich life: read serious authors. There's Montaigne out there. There's Orwell. After a while, you'll recognize good writing and thinking, and you won't waste your time on pap.
Do you consider Werner Sombart, and Ernest Mandel to be 'half wits' and unserious?
I haven't read either, but if you mean that them using the phrase legitimates it, then that isn't so. Clever people have invented many phrases that later become stale or absurd. If nothing else, consider that both men are long dead, whilst capitalism's "late" stage continues unabated.
In trying to live an intellectually rich life, there's a risk of adding too much noise. Chasing more input, more ideas, more learning. Sometimes less really is more. Depth often comes not from adding, but from subtracting. Clear away the noise, and what’s left tends to have 'meaning'. Personally I prefer a deep life to a rich life, but maybe that's just semantics...
Bro, that was a lot of text... I mean, chill. Life is simpler then that. Enjoy your flaws and get along with things as they are, without the need of a "framework" to navigate life
Congrats, yours is the most condescending comment on this site today.
That sounds like you have already got a framework that works for you, which is great for you. Too bad it's a framework that drives you to upbraid innocent strangers on the internet.
Not everyone can take action on the words "just chill." We're all in different places in life—think of it as a state space model. The same vector of force results in different coordinates when applied to different coordinates.