Hacker News Reader

Comment by zopa | Hacker News Reader

If we're talking about writing from ancient Sumeria, or another civilization in the distant past, than everything we can recover really is valuable. A text doesn't have to be another Epic of Gilgamesh for it to teach us a lot about societies we know relatively little about.

View on HN

You have an implicit assumption that the benefit of learning information always justifies the effort and time spent on learning it. I don't think that's a given or true.

Not everything has to be a benefit.

For many of us it's not about some cost/benefit analysis, but passion and curiosity.

That's still following an objective perceived benefit: quenching a passion and satisfying curiosity.

It's following a passion, but hardly an "objectively perceived benefit".

Except in the sense that everything is a benefit (including shooting heroin, where the benefit is the high, and so on) where the term becomes meaningless. But even so, it still wouldn't be "objectively perceived". More like "subjectively pursued and felt".

> where the term becomes meaningless

Sure, you're welcome to just stop examining thoughts at the surface level and not dig deeper. Other people here seem content with that. I'm not.

Now you’re moving the goal posts. You argued that writings from the past are worthless; I pointed out that they have great historical value. Cost-benefit analysis is beside the point. But we’re both here writing comments in a Hacker News thread so the option value of our time can’t be all that high.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com