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Comment by aub3bhat | Hacker News Reader

Meh DFW is the last person you ought to listen to for advice. [1] It's just demotivational-speak paraded around as if it were some profound wisdom, just to assuage ego of your average reader with Liberal arts degree. So that she/he can fool herself by believing that they are better than others because they "truly care"...

“truly to care about other people and to sacrifice for them” is just meaningless babbling that you would expect from a writer who needs to sell empty wisdom to demotivated readers. In reality Power and Knowledge are essential if one aims to enable true change.

[1] http://www.vulture.com/2015/06/rewriting-of-david-foster-wal...

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I wouldn't be so quick to say that Wallace' intentions are only commercial, i. e. "to sell empty wisdom[..]".

That's mostly because he's been dead for 10 years. Also, if you're trying to sell empty philosophy to "average, depressed liberal-arts majors who lack power and knowledge", it strikes me as a particularly bad idea to start with a 1,076-page tome? I mean–he could've at least made it a 12-part series, right?

You're also short-changing those liberal arts majors. After all, many of them go on to law school, with the result that Congress is about 2/3 liberal arts majors. And it's not like the liberal arts have nothing useful to teach. Most graduates would, for example, consider the idea that "in reality power [..] is essential if one aims to enable true change" a tautology in need of an editor.

>> You're also short-changing those liberal arts majors. After all, many of them go on to law school, with the result that Congress is about 2/3 liberal arts majors.

Congress the beacon of efficiency, progress and wisdom.

I majored in philosophy, not CS.

Some of the best technologists I've ever worked with were film majors, history majors, philosophy majors, sociology majors, &c.

By far, the most important skill for this kind of work is critical thinking.

> In reality Power and Knowledge are essential if one aims to enable true change.

He's advocating for Knowledge so that you are not subjected to the whims or your "default settings" but instead are able to exercise _your_ personal Power on the basis of knowing yourself (and others) instead of just performing the script that is given to you by (this subset of our) culture.

Your criticism that "This is just meaningless babbling" which immediately transitions into advocating his point is... interesting.

I get why you're being downvoted, but I fully agree with you. When I was still in college and read 'this is water' for the first time it felt like an epiphany. Now, a few years down the road, it just seems pretentious to me.

Also, I don't mean any disrespect here, but the fact that he killed himself kind of taints these sort of speeches for me also. How much better is his proposed lifestyle/world-view really, if it didn't even work for the master-mind himself? (Assuming that the goal is to be happy of course.)

EDIT: Just to clarify, I know he was probably battling depression, but should a person fighting such a severe mental illness really be the one, one listens to for live-advice then?

Depression is orthogonal to critical thinking skills. Suggesting otherwise is ad hominem.

You can be wise and have mental health issues. In my experience often my friends with depression are wisest on this stuff because they have to deal with it all the time. Also, I don't think underlying health issues diminish it that much as you don't generally have much control over those issues

That seemed pretty motivational to me. The message I got was to try as hard as possible not to just "go with the flow" and choose what I can in life.

please expand upon your definition of "true change".

Microprocessors, Internet, Green Revolution, T-Cell therapy, China & India over the last 2 decades ..... You know the stuff that actually required knowledge and power. Not some feel goodery truthiness.

Yeah, this is the typical dismissal of anything not STEM!!STEM!!

In reality, technological invention has always gone hand-in-hand with progress in our understanding of how to organise a just and productive society. It's sometimes harder to point at specific examples because this change happened more gradually, but ignorance of this progress doesn't legitimise a wholesale dismissal.

Concepts such as the rule of law, democracy, capitalism etc. didn't appear out of nowhere, nor were they always-existing "goodery truthiness". And there's no technology that could be identified as central to their establishment.

In fact, I'm pretty sure I'd rather live in a society with the technology of the stone age and today's understanding of law&justice, than a society with the technology of today and the stone age's morality.

In as far as technology had an impact on such progress, Jared Diamond argues that it was mostly in increasing the productivity of farming, allowing more and more people to not work the fields, live in cities, and actually start thinking.

This is like every religious group taking credit for societal advancements.

> I'm pretty sure I'd rather live in a society with the technology of the stone age and today's understanding of law&justice

I'm sure we could conduct an easy experiment.. but maybe that's too empirical for you

This is so dismissive. You may not find those things valuable, but that doesn't make them valueless.

Exactly. One can hardly call the Civil Rights Act of 1964 (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Civil_Rights_Act_of_1964) as inconsequential.

Feel-goodery truthiness like emancipation of the slaves, women's suffrage, civil rights and the welfare state?

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