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Comment by libraryofbabel | Hacker News Reader

I do love Chekhov’s stories, but many years of humanities education has left me pretty jaded about “X invented the modern Y” claims. It’s a lazy formula and relies on the complete slipperiness of the term “modern” (oh and “invented” is kinda vague too).

Examples, based on ones I’ve heard: “Shakespeare invented the modern self” “Napoleon invented the modern state” “Newton invented modern science” (Or was it Galileo?) “Picasso invented modern painting”

Note that these examples span about 1600-1900. Perhaps we should just engage with the work on its own terms.

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Yes, I don't see much serious argument on the claim in the article itself, more like a puff piece for this new translation of his stories. Also Pevear-Volkhonsky has oft received flak for their translations[0].

[0] https://www.commentarymagazine.com/articles/gary-morson/the-...

"Bastard asked me to understudy Konstantin in The Seagull. I'm not going to understudy anybody. Especially that pimp! Anyway, I loathe those Russian plays. Always full of women staring out of windows, whining about ducks going to Moscow"

― Withnail & I (1987)

Plays in general are probably the easiest form of writing to distill into stereotypes since they rely heavily on dialogue and that's bound to get repetitive when thousands of works are written. I can think of a dozen plays right now where there were similar moments of young adults arguing with relatives (usually not parents but aunts or grandmas) or someone monologuing about a death that happened offscreen but in a vague way. All of these moments can be deconstructed and I do find them repetitive if I read a few plays in a row... but I still feel like it's wholly a matter of preference. If you like those elements - sad women staring out of windows, for example - you'll like the plays.

The great thing about plays is that they can be interpreted and reinterpreted again and again by different directors, set designers, composers, and actors. It's possible to bring the play into our own time or to subvert its ostensible message or to add new layers and nuances. It's wonderful that the text of the play is only the skeleton which to hang the body of the performance.

How this movie isn’t considered one of the best of all time is beyond me.

It.. generally is?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Withnail_and_I#Reception

Most of those are British...cult classic is a decent epitaph but most people have not heard of it...

The early ones were predominantly, but did you keep reading?

* 2000 Total Film third greatest comedy film of all time

* 2004 Total Film 13th greatest British film of all time.

* 2014 readers of Empire 92nd greatest film

* 94% "fresh" rating from 34 critics, and an average rating of 8.48 out of 10 from critic website Rotten Tomatoes.

* 2009 Empire 118 in 500 Greatest Films of all Time list.

* 2009 American Pulitzer prize-winning film critic Roger Ebert four-star review, added the film to his "Great Movies" list

Unless their hobby is watching classics, regardless of anything else about the film, 'most people have not heard of' a lot of films in that region of 'greatest of all time' films.

They are fun to argue about however! e.g. Montaigne invented the modern self. (Shakespeare was a student of Montaigne.) Bacon invented modern science – the huge enterprise of science and scientific research as we know it today is his program.

And I would argue that Muslim scientists such as Ibn al-Haytham employed the scientific method before Bacon.

That seems irrelevant - I wasn't at all talking about which individuals were recognizably doing science, but where (the program of) modern science came from. Bacon didn't do science, didn't 'employ the scientific method', just wrote about and promoted a huge program of scientific investigation, which is what we call 'modern science'. From The Oxford Francis Bacon:

Before Bacon where else does one find a meticulously articulated view of [science] as an enterprise of instruments and experiment, an enterprise designed to restrain discursive reason and make good the defects of the senses? Where else in the literature before Bacon does one come across a stripped-down natural-historical programme of such enormous scope and scrupulous precision, and designed to serve as the basis for a complete reconstruction of human knowledge which would generate new, vastly productive sciences through a form of eliminative induction supported by various other procedures including deduction? Where else does one find a concept of scientific research which implies an institutional framework of such proportions that it required generations of permanent state funding to sustain it? And all this accompanied by a thorough, searching, and devastating attack on ancient and not-so-ancient philosophies, and by a provisional [science] anticipating the results of the new [science]?

But thanks, I didn't know anything about Ibn al-Haytham, e.g. that his Book of Optics (written 1011-1021) "was read by and greatly influenced a number of scholars in Christian Europe including: Roger Bacon, Robert Grosseteste, Witelo, Giambattista della Porta, Leonardo Da Vinci, Galileo Galilei, Christiaan Huygens, René Descartes, and Johannes Kepler"!

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ibn_al-Haytham

Ah, I have always associated Bacon with the scientific method and was not aware of the wider program he developed.

But I still do not see my comment as irrelevant. Would Bacon have been able to develop his program without learning from the efforts of scientists who worked to apply the scientific method in the real world?

I suspect the lesson here is: There are often people who have happened upon a valuable way-of-working but who have not yet thought enough about it to explain it in a way that many others can notice and scalably copy.

Then you also get into the problems of multiple independent discoveries, or convergent research. Or whether someone's discovery is relevant at all if nobody learns from it -- that is, what is the value of popularizing a method over its mere discovery?

Right, but that goes back to the original point, which I am in agreement with: it is usually tough to pinpoint a single, specific person who was responsible for a discovery or invention. And as you noted, it can also depend on how you frame the discovery and its impact.

Plato invented the modern IngSoc: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24069572

Bacon invented the modern (bitstream) cryptographic encoding: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24339584

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