Curiosity damned the cat | Hacker News Reader

Curiosity damned the cat

edwardfeser.blogspot.com

55 pointsdanielam19 comments

> "And the most absurd manifestation is the rise of “geek culture” – of people who devote enormous amounts of time and energy to learning and thinking about the minutiae of fictional universes from movies, comics, and games, or who obsess over the work and personal lives of favorite actors, musicians, bands, etc. My point, as longtime readers know, is by no means to disparage such things per se. But for many people today, such trivial pursuits have gone well beyond a point that is spiritually healthy, and have become a kind of substitute religion."

Can't say I find this very convincing. People may find joy out of obsessing over "the work and personal lives of favorite actors, musicians, bands, etc." Or it may allow them to connect with it in new ways. Feser says he doesn't want to disparage this, but it isn't "spiritually healthy." Whatever that means.

I didn’t get that far in the essay, but experience shows that people who take their fandoms maybe a little too seriously are healthier, and certainly less dangerous, than people who take their religions a little too seriously. At least most of them know that these worlds are fictional. I have strong opinions about TOS being superior to any Trek that came after, but I’m unlikely to start a shooting war over it, or strap on a suicide vest.

I suspect this strongly depends on a religion and a fandom. For example, fandoms that cause self-harm in a chase of some fictional perfection vs people who are heavily into Buddhism or derivatives.

I was forgetting about soccer hooligans.

or stalkers

I'd be interested in hearing a few bullet points on TOS vs TNG from you :)

Probably the most relevant bullet point is the year of my birth.

I wonder if it's safe to say that every religion started as pop culture.

I'm also not convinced. Discussing fictional minutia with Star Trek fans is an experience very far from discussing religious topics. No one will hate and ostracize you for thinking Data shouldn't have adopted a cat, for example.

I have to say, this has changed with Discovery. This series has attracted new fans that will definitely hate and berate you if you say the wrong thing about certain characters. Using the incorrect pronouns when discussing trans-characters is an unwritten bannable offense in r/StarTrekDiscovery, for example. That sure feels like religion.

I think the giveaway for this paragraph comes right at the end: "a kind of substitute religion".

What's more compelling: myths written for another culture in another time/place or ones written for you by your contemporaries addressing current problems with fantastic production values? Feser is right to be concerned: successful religions, like successful companies, must be wary of flashy startups that can outmaneuver them.

Still, a fantastic and insightful article.

I always find Feser thought-provoking. Haven't read anything of his for a while though, so this was refreshing. Will probably spend more time browsing his posts from the past few months now.

In regard to the subject matter, I do wonder how it may relate to the pursuit of knowledge for the sake of keeping it a secret, at least for a time, for the purposes of using it to start a business with a competitive advantage.

I wonder, because this is precisely what I'm doing. Startups are obviously a great place for unhealthy / disordered desires for wealth, power, fame, etc., to easily take root, and I wonder how the pursuit of knowledge may play into that, or how one can guard against it.

I’m glad you’ve gotten something out of the writings of this Professor of Theology. When I’ve read him in the past I’ve found his lines of reasoning chaotic, his arguments unconvincing, and him to be uninformed about some of the matters he treats at length. But, perhaps more seriously, his comportment is inconsistent with someone who wants to be taken seriously. He often seems to be fighting personal battles against real or imagined enemies, rather than examining ideas. At times he descends into personal insults against people whose opinions he objects to. It’s here, too: look at the swipe against the imagined “village atheist” right off the bat—a phrase obviously intended to evoke the “village idiot”. He’s hard to take seriously for me, or even to tolerate beyond a few paragraphs.

I came here to provide similar, if not this exact feedback. I hadn't heard of the author before today and I only made it to the second labelled section of the essay before thinking, "Wow this reeks of arrogance and lack of self-awareness."

I must be on a different planet because he didn't sound that way to me at all. Even his "village atheist" comment that parent had a fit over completely slipped by me until he pointed my attention to it just now, and it doesn't seem like the kind of thing the author meant in bad faith.

I quite enjoyed the ideas discussed in the article, and even though it is steeped in religious undertones, you don't have to be religious to understand his broader point, I think.

“The highest sort of knowledge concerns the divine first cause and last end of our existence, and of how to prepare our souls so that they might be united to him forever. The further one’s intellectual pursuits take one from interest in and knowledge of these ultimate matters, the more disordered they are.”

So yeah, I think you kinda do.

Very much seconding this take. His arguments routinely lack nuance and there's some tenuous dot-connecting.

As I got to the end of the article, I kind of got this nagging feeling that when I went to read about the author I was going to find some bit about conservative punditry, and lo-and-behold it was there.

Nailed it.

> One of them is the desire to be seen as clever. Manifestations of this might include developing abstruse lines of argument, with feigned earnestness, for positions one does not really take seriously and one’s readers are not likely to take seriously either; the use of logical symbolism and other technical apparatus in cases where it is not necessary in order to make one’s point; a predilection for one-upmanship and argumentativeness; and, in general, a tendency to treat intellectual life as a kind of game or mental onanism.

If their blog post isn't self-ironic on purpose, then it is at least accidentally. I would definitely categorize the writing above as an excellent example on how someone might choose to word their opinion or thoughts in a manner that is seen as intellectual. The whole post reeked of this mental intellectual onanism.

Making St. Thomas accessible by relating his work to modern times is a skill. Great post.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com