Hacker News Reader

Comment by Barrera | Hacker News Reader

The video clip omits the most important part of Vonnegut's lecture. He does Hamlet and it's a flat line. It's odd because this is the point of the article yet the clip omits it.

See this one, for example (near the end):

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4_RUgnC1lm8

Vonnegut concludes:

"We don't know enough in life to know what the good news is and the bad news is."

Cinderella and the rest are fantasy. Hamlet is the truth. Life is ambiguous and stories that tell us otherwise are lying to us.

This story graph thing has been quoted out of context so many times that people have completely forgotten the point Vonnegut was trying to make.

View on HN

This is even explained in the article. It is the "infographic" which entirely misrepresent his point.

The title of the article is also rather misleading. It makes is sound like he thinks there is exactly 8 possible shapes, while he is just showing some examples.

Ah good point - we've de-eighted the title now. This is an obvious (except I missed it) application of the site guideline:

If the title contains a gratuitous number or number + adjective, we'd appreciate it if you'd crop it. E.g. translate "10 Ways To Do X" to "How To Do X," and "14 Amazing Ys" to "Ys." Exception: when the number is meaningful, e.g. "The 5 Platonic Solids."

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Beautiful talk. Vonnegut nailed it.

Hamlet was the truth of his time. There is meaning to life and stories about life that you can't describe as lying.

"We don't know enough in life to know what the good news is and the bad news is."

We won't know the answer to this challenge for a very long time.

> We won't know the answer to this challenge for a very long time.

This is essentially the "halting problem", or the "principle of computational irreducibility", or whatever equivalent formulation you want to pick. We'll never know the answer -- for most computations there are no shortcuts to predict their outcomes.

Note that at the same time he refutes his earlier part about the stories of primitive people (as he put it) who had stories that were completely flat ( https://youtu.be/4_RUgnC1lm8?t=2470 ).

Contextomy, happens all the time https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/016344370505397...

Stop trying to educate me. I just want to be entertained. Tell me that I am smart.

What an inspiring lecture… thanks for posting!

Reply on news.ycombinator.com