Hacker News Reader

Comment by 6502nerdface | Hacker News Reader

> Let me tell you that when I was a kid I loved to read, I read voraciously everything I could find, and I did because nobody made me do it.

Completely agreed, and this has been argued since antiquity. In Plato's Republic:

Socrates: Therefore, calculation, geometry, and all the preliminary education required for dialectic must be offered to the future rulers in childhood, and not in the shape of compulsory learning either.

Glaucon: Why's that?

Socrates: Because no free person should learn anything like a slave. Forced bodily labor does no harm to the body, but nothing taught by force stays in the soul.

Glaucon: That's true.

Socrates: Then don't use force to train the children in these subjects; use play instead. That way you'll also see better what each of them is naturally fitted for.

View on HN

Tolstoy, after he became an anarchist, believed that education should be devoid of coercion, and inspired many anarchist inspired education experiments around the turn of the century (1900).

From Tolstoy's Wikipedia page: "Fired by enthusiasm, Tolstoy returned to Yasnaya Polyana and founded 13 schools for children of Russia's peasants, who had just been emancipated from serfdom in 1861. Tolstoy described the school's principles in his 1862 essay 'The School at Yasnaya Polyana'. Tolstoy's educational experiments were short-lived, partly due to harassment by the Tsarist secret police. However, as a direct forerunner to A. S. Neill's Summerhill School, the school at Yasnaya Polyana can justifiably be claimed the first example of a coherent theory of democratic education."

Politics and Culture in Anarchist Education: The Modern School of New York and Stelton, 1911-1915: http://www.jstor.org/stable/1179429?seq=1#page_scan_tab_cont...

The Unlikely History of Tolstoy College: http://news.infoshop.org/education/unlikely-history-tolstoy-...

Interesting, didn't know that; thanks! I wonder what Tolstoy and Montessori would have thought of each other's schools :)

I don't think an appeal to authority is gonna work in this thread.

Have an upvote. While I find your comment humorous, it's also insightful. I don't see why others would downvote it.

Yeah, GP is making a clever allusion to TFA, not actually accusing me of appeal to authority :)

Exactly and thanks.

While Plato is something of an authority (and thus the best target for the joke), he does show his work. HN is pretty good about avoiding appeal to authority.

But it is a frightfully common logical fallacy, and the perhaps the only one we spend so much time educating our children to use. Largely by example.

>But it is a frightfully common logical fallacy, and the perhaps the only one we spend so much time educating our children to use. Largely by example.

All logical fallacies are actually valid ways of thinking about things.

It's good to avoid them (or use them) but only in moderation.

The idea that avoiding logical fallacies all the time is OK, is actually illogical.

Sure, something might not be true just because an authority on the matter said it, but it's more likely to be true than what some random person said about the subject. E.g. one would rather trust Einstein than the guy who says they invented perpetual motion. The idea of the burden-of-proof (which is totally valid) is against total adhesion to "appeal to authority".

And given finite lifetimes, and other interests, we're not gonna all learn medicine and evaluate any claim on a medical issue we have from our street cleaner and our doctor alike. We'll trust the doctor, appeal to authority be damned -- and it's the smart thing to do, even if it's not 100% accurate (the doctor might be wrong).

Spotting "fallacies" is a guideline -- and a crude and incomplete one at that, and mostly useful for judging propaganda pieces and things like that. Not something that is actually useful in casual conversation.

In fact conversation would be 100% impossible without "appeal to authority" of some sort, except if you expect anyone to prove everything from first principles.

The quote is a quote from a well regarded (for millennia) piece of thinking on pedagogy. You're not asked to take it as truth because Plato said it, but it's worth to ponder what he had to say, especially since it's a foundational part of western civilization.

You can read it as "hey, millennia of people though this has a good point -- maybe there's something into it?". Or at least at "hmm, here's what many people used to think is a valid point about pedagogy".

I think you're missing the intent here.

But it you're turning off your logic in casual conversation, expect to get burned. Detecting fallacies should be an always-on feature, like HTTPS. Most of the time you're not going to have a MITM attack... until you do.

I think you've also missed the point of TFA, which says that anti-authoritarians can accept authority, if it proves to be a legitimate authority. And it still requires you to use logic, because no authority is perfect. I may be a Lutheran, but that in no way makes me a creationist like Martin Luther.

>But it you're turning off your logic in casual conversation, expect to get burned. Detecting fallacies should be an always-on feature, like HTTPS.

I don't suggest turning off logic in casual conversation. Rather I suggest that one doesn't put it in autopilot -- as if fallacies (or their lack thereof) are the ultimate judgement of an argument.

I think it is more an appeal to classics, which is different from an appeal to authority.

Indeed!

I too read for the freedom and power it brought me. So many of us, I imagine...

As a rule of thumb I tend to intensely dislike Plato, but that is surprisingly modern.

Disliking Plato because he's not "modern" is a little silly. His teachings are obviously old, but they were also a huge stepping stone in philosophy.

I do not dislike Plato because he is "not modern". I am sorry if I gave you that impression.

And I do not debate his influence on European philosophy, which is hard to underestimate.

Mostly, the reason I dislike Plato is because in school I had a teacher who practically worshipped Plato and acted as if he was the pinnacle of philosophy or human thinking in general.

Also, a few years later, I was unfortunate enough to read an introduction to European philosophy written by somebody who literally said that European philosophers could be divided into two groups - those who agreed with Plato, and those who were wrong.

So when it comes to Plato, I am kind of "traumatized".

What I meant to say was that it took us surprisingly long to rediscover that particular piece of wisdom expressed by Plato, and that given my attitude towards him, I was pleasantly surprised to see him express such a thought.

It's unfortunate that you are "traumatized" in regards to Plato, or anything, for that matter. Even though you consider yourself "traumatized", Plato still has good ideas, and likely some not so good ideas as well. I would encourage judging the ideas on their own merit, and not to immediately dismiss them simply because you don't like Plato.

Socrates/Plato and Aristotle's writings remain highly relevant today in regards to the origins of democracy, western civilization, alphabetical language, and the "market economy" of uniform pricing systems.

Is that your paraphrase or a quotation from a particular translation? I don't think I've seen Plato translated into this kind of colloquial modern English before. It works really well.

I transcribed it (with added speakers' names) from my hard copy of Grube's 1974 translation, 2nd edition revised by Reeve in 1992. Agreed, I like the modern English fluency, and supposedly it's quite accurate, though I don't know enough Attic Greek to say myself.

Edit: Book VII, starting at 536d. You can compare against the public domain Jowett translation at http://classics.mit.edu/Plato/republic.8.vii.html (search in the page for "slave")

Reply on news.ycombinator.com