The relentless honesty of Ludwig Wittgenstein (2017) | Hacker News Reader

The relentless honesty of Ludwig Wittgenstein (2017)

the-tls.co.uk

152 pointsneonate77 comments

I've been a big fan of Wittgenstein since college, and have at this point read just about all of his work. I might suggest that people new to Wittgenstein start neither with the Tractatus nor with Philosophical Investigations, but with the Blue and Brown Books (you want the Blue part).

These are lecture notes toward what would later become the PI. They're way less systematic than the big two, but they'll give you a great feel for Wittgenstein's thought.

I'll also second Monk's biography, which is just superb.

One of my favorite things about Wittgenstein, is that there's a powerful strain in his thought that regards philosophical speculation as essentially a form of "madness." That is to say, if you're sitting around wondering what "justice" is or trying to figure out the mind/body distinction, you're engaging in a kind of nonsensical behavior. It is the purpose of philosophy to resolve these problems -- which, in Wittgenstein's case, often meant showing why they're nonsensical questions in the first place -- so you can go back to living your life. In Monk's biography, you often see him revolutionizing modern philosophy and then afterward going to work as a gardener.

I think this explains, in part, why he is more admired than influential in modern analytical philosophy. He is one of the many twentieth-century philosophers to suggest that the proper outcome for philosophy is to stop doing it.

[edits for typos]

Yes, absolutely! He even explicitly stated that in a letter to Norman Malcolm, dated November 1944 [0]:

"What is the use of studying philosophy if all that it does for you is to enable you to talk with some plausibility about some abstruse questions of logic, etc., & if it does not improve your thinking about the important questions of everyday life"

[0]https://books.google.de/books?hl=en&lr=&id=JfnyUT7Oo_wC&oi=f...

I enjoy Richard Rorty's writings along similar lines, like in his essay "Trotsky and the Wild Orchids":

"I decided to major in philosophy. I figured that if I became a philosopher I might get to the top of Plato's 'divided line' - the place 'beyond hypotheses' where the full sunshine of Truth irradiates the purified soul of the wise and good: an Elysian field dotted with immaterial orchids. It seemed obvious to me that getting to such a place was what everybody with any brains really wanted."

"The more philosophers I read, the clearer it seemed that each of them could carry their views back to first principles which were incompatible with the first principles of their opponents, and that none of them ever got to that fabled place 'beyond hypotheses'."

"When I am asked (as, alas, I often am) what I take contemporary philosophy's 'mission' or 'task' to be, I get tonguetied. The best I can do is to stammer that we philosophy professors are people who have a certain familiarity with a certain intellectual tradition, as chemists have a certain familiarity with what happens when you mix various substances together."

"Despite my relatively early disillusionment with Platonism, I am very glad that I spent all those years reading philosophy books. For I learned something that still seems very important: to distrust the intellectual snobbery which originally led me to read them. If I had not read all those books, I might never have been able to stop looking for what Derrida calls 'a full presence beyond the reach of play', for a luminous, self-justifying, self-sufficient synoptic vision."

I guess in math they found it just gets more complex, as you go deeper? eventually you need new tools, upon new tools? Is this like philosophy? you just find you need more tools? I'm no expert. And that's why I'm putting question marks around.

Often in maths you build higher and higher abstractions until you've finally succeeded in an abstraction high enough to encode the very axioms you started with, at which point you're back where you started, if a little wiser for the journey.

At this point I'm fairly sure going deeper (or higher) in mathematics is a dead end, you should instead try to go sideways, to the 'ground level' questions that aren't answered yet, or to the questions that aren't yet mathematical.

Great insight. and thanks for taking the time to clear things

I was likely butchering the Godel incompleteness theorem.

>What is the use of studying philosophy if all that it does for you is to enable you to talk with some plausibility about some abstruse questions of logic, etc.

Some would argue that philosophy has never helped with any ordinary question (only purporting to), but has made contributions to society through logic's support of math.

Maybe it's worth mentioning that he didn't write most of "his" books apart from the Tractatus and Philosophische Untersuchungen. The others might still be worth reading but they are mostly notes from his students.

Having studied analytical philosophy in university I also find it interesting that Wittgenstein is seen as a founding father of the analytical movement while his later philosophy can be understood as a refutation of analytical philosophy.

You have some valid points about the transcendence of philosophy in stopping the pursuit of pseudo-problems. In relation to that there's also a hint in the end of the Tractatus about (the most important?) things that cannot be said but only shown.

Also I found it funny that he supposedly said that there are more profound insights to be found in the crime stories he read than in the philosophical journal "Mind". (I think that's mentioned in Malcom's book).

Yes philosophical admiration of Wittgenstein indicates a failure to take him seriously. If he was right, people should stop philosophising.

But they don't. Wittgenstein failing to end philosophy not once but twice in the Twentieth Century marks him out as a doubly spectacular failure on his own terms.

The problem may be that neither logic nor philology exhausts philosophy in ways simpler than philosophy itself. Wittgenstein's domineering charisma and conceptual purity make his attempts to do so dazzling in ways that the flounders of the analytic tradition don't have access to.

> If he was right, people should stop philosophising.

Slight asterisk-- if he was right, philosophers would be employed as counselors, to help people realize that the deep problems they are wondering about are probably just problems with language, or the limits of vague, abstract terminology.

> But they don't.

Ha, I don't know-- which way is "philosophers per capita" actually trending?

> Slight asterisk-- if he was right, philosophers would be employed as counselors, to help people realize that the deep problems they are wondering about are probably just problems with language, or the limits of vague, abstract terminology.

That's right. And that is exactly what Rorty came to believe.

There are other ways of doing philosophy than the type that Wittgenstein was rejecting. And in fact they are the basis of things like modern science, technology, and liberal democracy.

Wonderful article for a short introduction into his work. He was a fascinating personality and his writings are extraordinary. He „only“ published two books in his lifetime, one being tractatus logico-philosophicus, the other being a dictionary for school children. Philosophical Investigations was published post-humously, but it is an excellent view into his mind.

As mentioned in the article, there are no subsections, no table of contents. It consists of almost 700 paragraphs. You have to read it from beginning to end. Why I find that great in its own way? Maybe the analogy with the movie >Being John Malkovitch< may help: you are like a visitor in his head. Our thoughts are not tidy and ordered into sections. When you think about a problem (like he does with language and what it is and what it can do and what not), your mind wanders; you come across different issues, tackle them, then come back. It‘s like a written thought process.

I can really recommend this book. Its language is easy. As soon as you get used to its style, you can follow.

I completely agree with your sentiment on our thoughts. They aren't neat and tidy. People like to pretend they are, but this simply isn't true.

It's also interesting to think about exactly where these thoughts come from. Where did the thought come from for example that invoked you opening up hacker news at the time you wrote this?

Where does great intuition come from? It's all fascinating whether you prescribe to a theory that likens consciousness to that of thinking rocks or if you're incredibly spiritual and think of consciousness more as a radio signal that were tuned into at some arbitrary frequency when we're alive in Earth.

If you're interested in being a visitor in ones mind, could I humbly request you check out my comment? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18814685

“I should have liked to produce a good book. This has not come about, but the time is past in which I could improve it.” (Preface to Philosophical Investigations)

The preface is actually very fun to read. Very honest, quite cynical, too.

>"[...] mainly because I was obliged to learn that my results (which I had communicated in lectures, typescripts and discussions), variously misunderstood, more or less mangled or watered down, were in circulation. This stung my vanity and I had difficulty in quieting it."

Such bare honesty! I love it.

I've noticed Wittgenstein is mentioned quite a lot on HN threads about philosophy. I suspect he's a favorite of engineer types because his conceptions nullify large swaths of philosophical activity and thinking. This conclusion allows the untrained student to feel as if they've entered a cheat code to reach the end of the discourse -- it's all a language game, so I need not waste my time with further inquiry.

Strongly disagree. Wittgenstein clears the way for traditional philosophy topics (ethics, aesthetics, etc.) to be taken seriously.

'Engineer types' may react to ethical discussions by pointing out that you can't define right and wrong, and may then wrongly conclude that they don't exist. But Wittgenstein shows that this is an isolated demand for rigor.

You can't define right or wrong? Tell that to an Aristotelian. You can most certainly define it and ground a natural law theory in it.

I hope that's not true. Wittgenstein certainly led me deeper into the subject, not away from it.

"It's all a language game so why bother" is about as intellectually barren (and misinformed) as saying, "Well, Turing demonstrated that all programming languages are 'equivalent,' so it doesn't really matter."

Wittgenstein is one of those rare, inimitable thinkers. I get a sensation reading his work that I rarely get reading the work of others: that he truly was someone who thought about the world with great incisiveness and depth, beyond the confines of any particular discipline or outlook—a logician with a mystic's underbelly. Each one of his pithy notes exudes the degree of exhaustiveness with which he's contemplated the topic—it's a great experience. I highly recommend checking out some of his writing. Aside from the Tractatus it's not systematic, and as such I do not think there's any particular reason to study it systematically.

Philosophy as analysis, philosophy as therapy—Wittgenstein's writings present the collision of both of these perspectives.

My favourite Wittgenstein quote:

"A philosopher who is not taking part in discussions is like a boxer who never goes into the ring."

He's right. Modern intellectual and political aversion to open competition and experimentation is, at best, unethical.

And is certainly a reflection of people's lack of REAL confidence in themselves.

This, combined with our ironically deteriorating ability to communicate in a digital age is leading down not such a bright road.

Could you elaborate?

I suspect he's talking about people's refusal to "debate" whether they should be subjected to suffering, discrimination, abuse, etc.

As the other comment points out, people aren’t willing to challenge themselves but also feign a confidence about themselves due to various factors such as economic and societal pressures. Admitting you have no idea most of the time is probably more accurate (estimate is obviously a reasonably afauirable skill) but that’s not what boss man is looking for.

I think this also evidences itself in the prevalence of imposter theory, especially in younger generations. The reason the saying goes, “that feeling never goes away” is because we all operate outwardly as if we are more expert than we are and begin to believe that lie.

Does that clarify?

No, not really. It's still rather vague to me. Could you give me a concrete example?

Sure!

If you look at the levels of reported 'imposter syndrome', there is a noted rise over the last few years.

I'm assuming here that you are aware of imposter syndrome and perhaps have felt it at times yourself. I certainly have.

To our peers, we pretend we know more than we do to feign this confidence that has almost emerged as necessary since there are so many that can do our jobs as programmers.

This feigned confidence manifests as imposter syndrome. Since we can't be honest (and risk management firing us because we're incompetent), we never quite feel like we're 'good enough' for our jobs.

Does that help?

I wouldn't call it unethical, but unfair. It happens mostly in the more extreme corners of the political spectrum, whether it is right or left. That perspective of non-discussion has gained a strong foothold in the "center" unfortunately, too, recently. I believe many people have the feeling that they haven't been heard and thus are not interested in listening any more.

It's not an irreversible trend, I suppose, if each and everyone of us manages to take one step back and start listening again.

Yea that's what I was thinking, and also along with another idea about experimentation. People on both sides can become even intolerant of the other's rights to their civil libertiea and democratic right of self-governance. What I mean, in practice, is that if a state wants to legalize a plant, run its own healthcare system, well in fact they should be encouraged to do so. We should be to some extent tolerant of these experiments and competition among states in social policy. It is consistent with democracy and what the Founding Fathers intended. But instead everyone wants to command the authority of the central government to demand everyone has to do it their way, and the results end up really egregiously bad as you can see today.

You seem to be assuming a great deal of things axiomatically. All of your claims are subject to philosophical discussion. The "Founding Fathers" are not God. Liberalism, democracy, and civil liberties are not given and obvious goods (Plato saw democracy as the worst form of government and one that degenerates into tyranny, probably more through ethos than procedure).

Shouldn't philosopher seek truth and knowledge rather then one-on-one competition of quick wit and reaction?

If you never bounce ideas off of anyone else, its too easy to lead yourself down the path of convincing yourself that you are right.

Sure, but that is still better in long term writing format then debate, because debate favors more of quick reaction, showmanship and various rhetorical tactics that have zero to do with seeking knowledge. Debates are fun, but they are not for testing ideas.

I agree with that, but when Wittgenstein says 'discussions' I take that to mean any sort of dialogue, e.g. online

Mine is: "I am sitting with a philosopher in the garden; he says again and again 'I know that that's a tree,' pointing to a tree that is near us. Someone else arrives and hears this, and I tell them: 'This fellow isn't insane. We are only doing philosophy.'"

It's interesting and informative that a lot of the commenters here have positive reviews or experiences with Wittgenstein.

I have not read any of his work but remember Paul Graham had a mixed take on Wittgenstein in his essay "How to Do Philosophy". Wittgenstein helped shake up philosophical thought, but his later focus on philosophy of language led his followers to turn philosophy into a field of jargon.

http://www.paulgraham.com/philosophy.html

Whether philosophy has been a useless waste of time is a commonly recurring question. I think it's asked from a kind of historically privileged position, since we have already mostly gotten it over with, so to speak.

Another perspective is that these naive thoughts have a curious tendency to pop up, and philosophy as the work of critiquing and developing such thoughts is a crucial part of intellectual culture. There's a fascinating case in the history of AI research, as described by Hubert Dreyfus:

> When I was teaching at MIT in the 1960s, students from the Artificial Intelligence Laboratory would come to my Heidegger course and say in effect: ‘‘You philosophers have been reflecting in your armchairs for over 2000 years and you still don’t understand intelligence. We in the AI Lab have taken over and are succeeding where you philosophers have failed.’’ But in 1963, when I was invited to evaluate the work of Alan Newell and Herbert Simon on physical symbol systems, I found to my surprise that, far from replacing philosophy, these pioneering researchers had learned a lot, directly and indirectly, from us philosophers: e.g., Hobbes’ claim that reasoning was calculating, Descartes’ mental representations, Leibniz’s idea of a ‘universal characteristic’ (a set of primitives in which all knowledge could be expressed), Kant’s claim that concepts were rules, Frege’s formalization of such rules, and Wittgenstein’s postulation of logical atoms in his Tractatus. In short, without realizing it, AI researchers were hard at work turning rationalist philosophy into a research program.

> But I began to suspect that the insights formulated in existentialist armchairs, especially Heidegger’s and Merleau-Ponty’s, were bad news for those working in AI laboratories—that, by combining representationalism, conceptualism, formalism, and logical atomism into a research program, AI researchers had condemned their enterprise to reenact a failure. Using Heidegger as a guide, I began looking for signs that the whole AI research program was degenerating. I was particularly struck by the fact that, among other troubles, researchers were running up against the problem of representing significance and relevance—a problem that Heidegger saw was implicit in Descartes’ understanding of the world as a set of meaningless facts to which the mind assigned values, which John Searle now calls function predicates.

I recommend Monk's biography [1] and a short lecture by Wittgenstein [2]

[1] https://www.publishersweekly.com/978-0-02-921670-5

[2] https://www.jstor.org/stable/2183526

There’s a nice book by Edward Kanterian called “Ludwig Wittgenstein” from Reaktion Books Critical Lives series which is quite good, and shorter than Monk’s biography.

https://youtu.be/ermZKgG4htU

>But what is most strikingly original about Wittgenstein’s account in the Tractatus is his drawing out of the implications – which are to a degree disturbing – of this conception. One implication is for values. If I think or claim that the car is in the garage, then, built into that claim is the idea that this may be true or false. But when I think that, say, slavery is morally wrong, I think something that could not be otherwise than true (even if others should disagree

I believe the solution to this lies in collective subjectivism with a fancy twist. Underlying every disagreement about such a claim, we have an implicit agreement. If I say slavery is wrong and you say you disagree, then we actually agree about something; the fact that we disagree.

That agreement underlying the disagreement gives rise to new conversational opportunity to approach a new, more fundamental point of agreement.

In this example, we could ask something like the following to our debate partner: “would you like to be owned by me?” Employing Kant’s categorical imperative (or the golden rule or bowever else this idea has been named) to demonstrate to your opponent indeed no, they would not like to be enslaved.

Following that train of logic, we can begin to piece together agreements from the disagreements that we unavoidably come across when using a tool as blunt as language to describe anything close to resembling reality.

At some point, given the good faith participation of both partners in conversation, we will be able to form more agreements, phoenixes rising from the ashes of our disagreements, that will lead to something more closely resembling a “universal truth”, truism, true objective fact, etc.

After all, true is just the word we have for something that cannot be proven false. In the same way that we just pretend money has value and so it does, true doesn’t mean anything beyond the word itself. That doesn’t necessarily make it less useful, it’s just something we need to keep in mind.

On that note, this author does a fascinating job introducing a hypothesis that an alphabet causes a society to lean to value masculine thought processes more highly. Not sure what I think about the hypothesis yet but it’s been a fascinating listen thus far.

http://a.co/49lwAZNb

Collective subjectivism does not lead to universal truth even closely. There is no universal truth, but only your personal experience and perception. This is true both for things which you see, and also for morality. In Wittgenstein’s world, your subjective morality is neither true nor false.

What would you say of a hypothetical claim that was ideally translated to all languages that everyone, when asked, unforced, agreed that it was an accurate description of their subjective experience?

I'm digging underneath Wittgenstein's ideas of subjective morality a little bit. Humor me here and let me know what you think. I'm truly curious.

> What would you say of a hypothetical claim that was ideally translated to all languages that everyone, when asked, unforced, agreed that it was an accurate description of their subjective experience?

We don't actually learn anything fundamental here.

What if there is only one person left in the universe?

> There is no universal truth, but only your personal experience and perception.

Is that a universal truth?

The actual early-Wittgenstein retort to this question is to reference the saying/showing distinction. "That there are no universal truths is not a true proposition, but it is shown by there being no truth which is universal." Or something like that.

The late-Wittgenstein retort is to tell a better joke.

Your position assumes something like cartesian dualism, which is itself based on a series of universal claims, and furthermore has been rejected by most philosophers of the last century, including Wittgenstein himself.

"The early Wittgenstein on scientism"[0] and "Goodill on Scholastic Metaphysics and Wittgenstein"[1] for more on Wittgenstein.

[0] https://edwardfeser.blogspot.com/2010/06/early-wittgenstein-...

[1] https://edwardfeser.blogspot.com/2015/12/goodill-on-scholast...

I have a mixed feeling about this article. On the positive side, it does a good job of explaining the ideas in Wittgenstein's two books. On the negative side, the author fails to explain that there are similar ideas in Pragmatism and Existential-Phenomenology.

Also, the author fails to explain, as Roy Monk's book makes clear, that Wittgenstein had a highly dogmatic and rather irrational set of religious and cultural views.

There was a documentary on his life in the 80s, mentioning his life as teacher in a rural primary school (they even interviewed some of his pupils) and his acting in a silent movie [1]. It is these anecdotes which make history and biographies so vivid.

81] https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0013619/

a passing remark -- by all means read Wittgenstein's 'Philosophical Investigations' because it is readable as the article says. In the metaphysical world it can be hard cut through the work of its great thinkers. A sensible way to approach Wittgenstein is to start with a college level introductory book on Metaphysics to get the foundational ideas, Categories and Forms of Aristotle and Plato. Some modern philosopher writers can walk us through this nicely (Michale Loux from U of Chicago, his introductory writings or some other perhaps). What might be modern now (Trope Theory, World of States of Affairs, Stage Theory etc), their instigators first came to reject the basics of the ancients but in the end they actually dissect the work of the ancients for us. Travel to Wittgenstein along this path, read him only towards the end. One needs numbers and algebra before calculus.

I agree with that completely. Wittgenstein's "simplicity" is only apparent, because he tends to write as if he's the first person to ever do philosophy. But he knows he's not, and his grasp of classical metaphysics (like most philosophers of his era) was basically flawless. He is way more interesting to read with that background in place.

Thanks to that post I discovered after a short research that I share a lot with Wittgenstein personality-wise. I'm not sure if it's a good or a bad sign. Never heard about him before.

Is it bad to have expected to the article to be all about how his alleged virtue help become the famed figure he is today? This was just another portrait of his work.

Excellent article. Thanks for posting!

I've been told on exactly one count that my thought process echoes Wittgenstein.

Here's a recording of the comment as kind of a proof of why I think this is interesting to do. Very Meta. Watch Community of you enjoy this kind of thing:

Part 1: https://youtu.be/sx7K8O7IGxo

Part 2: https://youtu.be/wZGvJBXOkGs

I also do live thought explorations, record them, and put them on YouTube. Please come tell me why you disagree with some of my most honest thoughts.

https://youtu.be/buJSby8Eoco

https://youtu.be/z-_6A0nXkX8

are a couple of videos I could find off the bat. For anyone interested in just reading rather than watching the entire thought process, I've posted links in the descriptions to the final text produced. I'll also link my Medium page below.

I record the entire thought process because I think we are in dire need of honesty today. It's too easy to pretend we know more than we do. I have lots of theories I'd like to share and talk with people about and have an incredibly hard time finding any kind of audience, yet constantly find people taking about our suffering from problems I believe I can solve.

I know this comment is all over the place, but just like the current top comment describes, I find it fascinating looking inside people's thought process as it is the most raw thing we can do with language. I also believe as I hammer away on these keys that I could just keep typing and eventually bring it all back together, which I will now.

I believe developing trust amongst individuals is vital in a digital age if we are to maintain any degree of community as society. Wittgenstein style thought explorations (and now with new technology recording the process therein) are the most raw, unidealogically possessed form of thought we can share. Any level of rehearsal or editing, while they certainly improve the finished product, both waste time and present an opportunity for those idealogical possessions to creep back into play.

In previous human times, we had much less diverse information flux. This enabled us to more easily understand our environment and those around us. We saw the same people every day, knew our place, and knew what to expect more or less.

Today, we don't know anyone we talk to online. Pair that with the difficulty of forming a strong community and that leads to some pretty serious problems.

I mean ABSOLUTELY no disrespect to anyone with what I'm about to say: suicide rates in youths, as well as what appears to be an identity crisis where people are latching on to whatever made up concepts please them are caused by a theory I call "Information Radiation."

"Information Radiation" effects a culture of people much like nuclear radiation effects a single individual. It makes them sick and die. Our culture is dying. There's so much new information coming in (most of it being of little importance) that it is crowding out the old information we have stores about the value of our cultures precious stories. The ones that got us here.

Those stories aren't true, but hey, we're here! And very few intellectuals respect that. We are arrogant to think now that these stories of religious proportioms are just simply not a representation of physical events that happened in our space time that they aren't important or helpful.

If this was true, television and movies such as Game of Thromes, Harry Potter, and the Avengers simply would not be popular.

This is not a religious claim at all by the way. There's no man in the sky dictating things. There are in my opinion human spiritual happenings, but those are unimportant to include here to pursuade you of my opinions.

Lastly, I want to plug my website knophy.com that I'm working on.

TLDR on it is that it's a website that values competency and the comprehension of content. My utlimate goal is to pay both creators for creating content and consumers for forming comprehension about content. I believe I have invented a sound business model for doing that.

Details are below

https://link.medium.com/Hnu2JLZ0aT https://link.medium.com/nCVtpC00aT

Thanks for reading.

Honest yours, Michael Lustig.

Rather than downvote, can someone point out why they dislike this comment?

On an article on Wittgenstein's honest and fluid thinking style, I posted something similar to what the current top comment has described as the most interesting part of W's process.

Thanks in advance.

I hope you don’t take offense, but I would imagine some people are turned off by your self-promotion, the length of your post, and a tone that could be interpreted as pompous.

Thanks for the feedback. Much appreciated.

Can I ask what your background is and how old are you?

You seem actually quite genuine and to have good faith-in-discussion, and if that is correct I really implore you to value that about yourself. They are good and rare qualities that the world needs more of.

Also, I hope you do not take offense to this, but I can't help but recommend that if you haven't already, to see a professional about potential social disorders. Your comments consistently read with a naievity of social skills. I'm sorry and I dislike to compartmentalize anyone has disordered, but I think it could possibly help. I could also be completely wrong: after all, all I know of you is a few internet comments.

I’m 26 (or 27 I can’t remember) and I’m just a guy trying to do a bunch of good in a digital age that seems to care more and more about short term benefits and appeasing low attention spans than using technology to better humanity.

I’m a shitty Android (now attempting web / react / react native to build knophy.com) developer that’s been fired from every job I’ve had (besides being a soccer referee in high school) and I like to think outside the box. I don’t like being like everyone else. I don’t take offense very easily, and I don’t have a very easy time finding people to discuss these deep ideas with.

I do my best, and have actually found a couple from this very thread, but I don’t think the current landscape of the Internet is set up to value the kinds of contributions I’d like to bring. I’m designing knophy.com to hopefully help fix my personal problem.

Here’s some reading on that system if you’re interested and would like to help spread the idea:

overview: https://medium.com/@michaellustig/knophy-or-how-were-going-t...

benefits off use: https://medium.com/@michaellustig/step-by-step-explanation-o...

You didn't contribute to the talk about Wittgenstein, but exclusively talked about yourself and things you do.

In addition, instead of explaining the relationship of your activities with Wittgenstein (that could have been an on-topic contribution), you ask the reader to watch recordings.

How would recommend explaining the relationship of my activities W?

Honest question, I’d love to not come across as such a moron.

Thanks for the feedback.

Let me start by saying that it is great to see how you deal with the feedback you get, this is not an easy feat.

Some more preliminaries: When I write a comment on HN, I first ask myself: what is the message I want to send to potential readers? And then I put some effort into expressing it as good as I can. After reading your comment, I had a hard time identifying any message, and I think the reason is that you employed the method of giving us your raw thoughts without considering which message you would like to send. When I first read your comment, I didn't even bother to dig deep enough to decipher the content; if you don't spend effort in writing, why should I spend so much effort in reading? Now, after having watched the first video and read your comment five times, I understand the structure, but still only fragments of the content.

Let me give one example what I think you could explain, based on the partial understanding I gained: it seems that you consider it very important for people to capture and communicate their thoughts 'unfiltered', as they happen. If you could relate that to Wittgenstein's philosophy, that would be an on-topic comment. (I am not very familiar with Wittgensteins philosophy and don't see how that would obviously follow from his philosophy, maybe Wittgenstein experts immediately see it).

I see the dilemma you are in: you want to exemplify the style, and I ask you for something which is impossible to do in this style: polishing and refining a message until it is easy to read and understand. However, I also would say that your experiment - convincing the reader by exemplifying the approach - has failed, so it seems you anyway need to reconsider your approach.

Finally - and I hope it doesn't come over as patronizing - I think only few exceptional people have such clear thoughts that conveying them without any editing is a win for a large readership. I know for sure that my thoughts are initially much too chaotic. Maybe Wittgenstein was able to do it. You and me are far away from that level.

Absolutely! I truly don't want to come across as that downvote seeking troll. I really want to share and engage in rich conversations with interesting people online.

I really appreciate your feedback. I think you touched on a key point of contention for me that I need to work very hard on:

> if you don't spend effort in writing, why should I spend so much effort in reading?

I come at this from precisely the opposite angle: "I could pour my heart into something and have it ignored because it's too long, so I'm just going to throw everything at the wall and see what sticks."

Obviously, I know this is a poor solution. I'm actually building a website instead that I believe solves my problem and many more. That will give me the motivation required to put in the effort up front to polish things up a bit more.

The problem, for me, boils down to one thing: we have a content discovery problem. Low energy bullshit rises easily, while content that takes a while to parse rises quite quickly.

The saying "a picture is worth a thousand words" is perfect here. It's also roughly 1,000 times more difficult to read, parse, understand, and provide feedback for content such as mine than to like a gif on Reddit, for example.

Again, thank you for the feedback. I've copied it into my notes (highly recommend Bear app for mac / iOS if you're in the market) and will meditate on it and hopefully improve through it.

If you're interested in the project I'm working on that I believe solves this problem, here's some stuff I wrote about it:

https://medium.com/@michaellustig/knophy-or-how-were-going-t...

https://medium.com/@michaellustig/step-by-step-explanation-o...

Your rhetorical style undermines the arguably prescient content of your speech.

What style would be better to use? I don’t even know what you mean by rhetorical style, apologies.

Thanks for the feedback.

I think they mean that the unedited, the stream-of-consciousness style you're employing, while "honest" in that you give the reader the the full paper trail of where your conclusions are coming from, has a low signal-to-noise ratio, making it tedious to read.

It's surprising to me that someone compared your work to Wittgenstein's. His writing contains an extraordinary amount of dense, finely-honed philosophical content per page--rather the opposite of the 'let it all hang out' approach you seem to be taking. Which isn't to say either one is strictly better, although the previous commenter may disagree with me.

If you're looking for more feedback, I would suggest that you read. Read orders of magnitude more than you write, in fact, no matter how much you write. No matter how old or how experienced you are, philosophy is a party that has been going on for thousands of years and you have only just arrived. There is always more to read, and for any novel idea or theory you have that is keeping you up at night pondering it, there is almost certainly someone whose entire life's work was dedicated to the exploration of that one idea.

Read Wittgenstein on language, sure, but you're gonna then need Frege and the logical positivists for context. Then read into Hilbert and Russell's work on the foundations of mathematics, and then about Gödel's famous theorems and how they affected that program. There's a rewarding parallel to be drawn between what the conclusion of Wittgenstein's Tractatus says about the philosophy of language and what Gödel's incompleteness theorems say about the foundations of math, but you gotta do the work to get there.

Stream-of-consciousness is a well-worn technique at this point, and not just in writing or speaking. Read about theatre improvisation and jazz, and hip hop, and what those artists have to say about their processes, and read theorists and critics who are skeptical of the very possibility of what you're calling "honesty" in your writing.

Read history. Read about propaganda campaigns and why they worked, and past instances of "information radiation". Look up all the 20th century theorists who warned us about the power of television to make even the most horrific atrocities banal. It's all been said before.

Contributing new thought is hard work, and one of the reasons why it is hard work is that you have to first understand the entire conversation that had been already happening right up until you joined the party. Read anything and everything you can get your hands on, and then read more.

>I think they mean that the unedited, the stream-of-consciousness style you're employing, while "honest" in that you give the reader the the full paper trail of where your conclusions are coming from, has a low signal-to-noise ratio, making it tedious to read.

Certainly fair, great point!

>If you're looking for more feedback, I would suggest that you read. Read orders of magnitude more than you write, in fact, no matter how much you write. No matter how old or how experienced you are, philosophy is a party that has been going on for thousands of years and you have only just arrived. There is always more to read, and for any novel idea or theory you have that is keeping you up at night pondering it, there is almost certainly someone whose entire life's work was dedicated to the exploration of that one idea.

Whenever I am not working, spending time with my wife, or writing, I am reading or listening to books or podcasts on philosophy, thinking, history, etc. Great recommendation.

>Gödel's incompleteness theorems say about the foundations of math, but you gotta do the work to get there.

Have you heard of GEB? Fascinating you'd make that connection here. We could almost call that a Golden Braid on its own.

>Read history. Read about propaganda campaigns and why they worked, and past instances of "information radiation". Look up all the 20th century theorists who warned us about the power of television to make even the most horrific atrocities banal. It's all been said before.

Please point me to some reading about exactly what atrocities they warned of. I'd love to read more. I never claim any ideas are new, as I don't really believe that to be possible. Rather, there are no new ideas under the sun. This points at a more deeply ceded philosophy that we won't get to in this conversation.

>Contributing new thought is hard work, and one of the reasons why it is hard work is that you have to first understand the entire conversation that had been already happening right up until you joined the party.

If you provide any more feedback for me here, PLEASE, let me know where something like I'm working on has been done before as I'm searching far and wide for help.

https://medium.com/@michaellustig/knophy-or-how-were-going-t...

https://medium.com/@michaellustig/step-by-step-explanation-o...

You are not half as smart as you think you are and it is annoying

In what sense are you being honest with yourself if you can't put yourself in an objective enough frame of mind to see where the down-votes come from?

There’s no feedback.

I truly wouldn’t post something if I didn’t feel it was relevant so constructive feedback (as per HN guidelines) is much more useful than silent downvotes.

The downvote is feedback. It's feedback that other people don't find your post relevant. You can constructively review how you expect other people to find it relevant and imagine the reasons why they wouldn't.

Wow, you really think highly of yourself. Most of us have thought ourselves to be geniuses ( as you do ) until we actually faced truly difficult challenges which humbled us. I suggest you stop engaging in meme philosophy and actually produce a body of work that rigorously puts forth your position(s). I cannot put enough emphasis on rigor. Define things you are talking about, don't just pass things over because they are "obvious," that's where most problems come from. I think you will find in doing this that you don't actually have much to say. I was once like you. Please heed my advice and grow.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com