Before I reach my enemy, bring me some heads
samkriss.substack.com
samkriss.substack.com
After all what is Shakespeare but a bunch of old stories rewritten by someone who lived after the printing press? And to read him today is to read a mass of clichés…most of which were original when he wrote them.
I do disagree with one point which I hope was intended to be hyperbolic:
> You’re experiencing the agony of the dead word of the book, where the future is already set down, waiting for you on the final page, where nothing changes…
The novel, to me, is the ultimate in multimedia experience, where a scene set in winter can make me feel cold, while a video of the same is too flat, perhaps in some ways too descriptive, stripping the interpretation from the experience. Reading a book for a second time years after the first can unearth a completely different story, like revisiting a city you haven’t visited for years, but in the case of reading only one of you has changed.
It struck me as an excellent description of how it feels for me now to pick up a book, at least before I manage to stay with it long enough to settle into it and experience the multisensory panorama you speak of. Books are no less potent now, for me, but they are more impenetrable; there's a thicker shell of resistance to break through before I can have that experience; and Sam Kriss's words here describe it exactly.
That's more likely from dopamine being fried from screens and instant gratification than a statement about the quality of books.
I got back into reading about a year ago, and it took me a month before I could read like I used to as a kid, fully immersed, let the world disappear kind of thing. I was looking up every minute before that with a strong urge to grab my phone.
I realized during a pre-Endgame re-watch that I liked a lot of the marvel movies better at home than I had in the theater, and after some reflection figured out that it’s because when I get really bored in the middle of one of their not-very-good 20-minute fight scenes, or awkward too-long exposition, I can just screw around on my phone.
On further reflection it occurred to me that this kinda replicates the experience of watching a mediocre movie with a close friend group and just talking over a bunch of it. Lots of movies are better when half-ignored!
Of course, there are plenty of movies where you’ll have trouble following them or miss cool, interesting, very-good, or important elements if you don’t give them your full attention. But I do think there may be a case for phone-in-hand film-watching. Some might argue that you should just skip any movie that gets better if you partially-ignore it, but I’m not on that boat.
Of course, reading a book is going to take some training. The nice part is that if one reads for 15 minutes to a half hour a day, it becomes fairly easy to focus on a book within a few days. As long as the book is engaging/interesting to its reader.
Turning the phone on silent and/or keeping it in another room while reading helps a lot as well.
So true! I most felt this with Neal Stephenson's Seveneves. The first time through, I was interested and engaged in the space procedural part but the wacky Stephenson bit at the end lost me. The second time I read, I was constantly dreading the events of the first few acts, but strongly engaged in the high concept section at the end.
Epic poets adopting, stitching, recycling, riffing, borrowing from other sources is appropriate for the medium of and vocation of poetry. It's appropriate for an oral tradition in oral societies.
Universities are not institutions of oral societies. The scientific method is not an institution of oral societies. Reproducibility and falsification of claims would not be possible.
The idea that a research university president should be held to the standards of ancient poets rather than the standards of a research university is silly. Citation of the provenance of one's claims, ideas, facts, data, and methods is central to what makes a university and university and what makes the production of knowledge using the scientific method a success.
If Dr Gay wishes to take the works of others, remix them, put her own spin on their work, integrate them into her framework, then she should go into the arts and become a poet or lyricist.
"People have a weird habit of acting as if the university is an institution of the Enlightenment, dedicated to the free enquiry of the individual intellect. It’s not! The university, alongside the capitalist mode of production, is one of the only major institutions that come to us out of the Middle Ages. It belongs to the age of repetition: the era of Dede Korkut."
Forcing Pindar's odes, Homer's epics, Njal's Saga, Dede Korkut, the Epic of Gilgamesh, and the Arthurian legends to follow the rules of the scientific method, and citation, and falsifiability, and judging them as stylistically and culturally deficient because they didn't sufficiently cite their influences would be bonkers. They would be ruined as pieces of art.
The reverse—allowing an R1 university to produce scientific knowledge using the rules of High Middle Ages poetry—is similarly ludicrous and ruinous.
I think he could be arguing that universities should stop trying to be research universities using the scientific method, because they've shown that they can't actually do it, and recategorize themselves as something different. But of course no university would be able to make money by doing that, because it would destroy their branding.
That's a dangerous business, with high odds of loss of mindshare, but if I'm right, doing nothing leads to the inevitable loss of mindshare. But they'll probably still choose to do nothing, because that loss of mindshare happens more slowly.
I would say that term is being used to label things that it shouldn't be used to label. We still have scientific models that have very accurate predictive power. But many things that are labeled as "scientific" aren't in that category.
Without knowing anything about what Dr Gay did exactly, scientists do this all the time. Almost every single survey paper does this. Plenty of non-survey papers do this. Only requirement is you rephrase the words in the original paper slightly.
A few days I submitted an article on this topic that didn't get traction: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38990154
Personally I think the real shift is that novelty is now presumed to be monetizable and there for must be monetizable -- either directly (sell recordings of songs) or indirectly (get tenure, and thus a paycheck). And then once that's the case, people kind of assume that it happens, so a scientist studying insect embryology may not get paid much either (or both) because it's not considered "worthwhile" ("who'd pay for that? Invent a new semiconductor!") or because the institution thinks all the professors are also getting money from their ideas.
Coming from an open source background (and as someone who has refused to get patents) this all sounds super bizarre to me.
[edit] Also : https://youtu.be/IeTybKL1pM4
I appreciate that the seeming non sequitur about Harvard disintegrating into the steppes is actually explained by the end of the piece.
> I think a warrior-poet of the teeming Oghuz would respond to the Harvard fiasco by cutting off the heads of everyone involved and then carting away all their stuff, and it would be hard to disagree with him.
(Obviously I don't agree this is the right approach to the situation, but I agree that is what a warrior-poet would do)
Again, I'm not saying he isn't good, but keep your critical faculties about you.
But I also agree with the other reply to you – sometimes his arguments don't actually really make any sense, they're just fun to read.
How the hell was this gem flagged @dang? One of the best things I read on HN and I almost missed it…
Interesting. Maybe because symbolic idioms?
"Temba, his arms wide"
At their best, collaborative content like memes, comments, forums and remixes allows us to occupy our social human self more effectively than a book, which was just the best technology available during the Enlightenment
To be perfectly honest, she had already discredited herself by claiming that direct calls for genocide can't be called "harassment". Note that the other college heads who did so voluntarily resigned after doing so.
If we had had a group of right wingers trying to climb over the whitehouse fence and had to evacuate staff, if would have been on the news on repeat, but because it looks bad to the 90% Democrat leaning media, it’s not.
My point is you seem to be pretending that this hasn't been the focal point of news for a while, when in fact it has.
Now we're being told that plagiarism is actually ok, it turns out that telling lies, doctoring results, passing off other's work as your own, etc is apparently ok and totally acceptable and was "always happening". It truly feels like we're fully enmeshed in some 1984 scenario with many words having their definitions totally changed, facts "updated", history rewritten, and just a general acceptance of mass gaslighting.
Pierre Menard was not a real person, but a fictional character in a book by Jorge Luis Borges.
It really tanks the trustworthiness of the article to find obvious errors like this, when the article as a whole depends on numerous literary references to back its arguments.
(I have made the same complaint before: <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8747352>)
Also why is "trust" at stake here?
This response is a quite poignant emphasis to the author's conceit honestly. We really cant just read anything anymore, its always some call to action, its always something being spoken at you which necessitates rebuttal or appeal to loftier ideas outside the text. The essay is dying along with everything else it seems.
I considered the possibility, but the reference was made so matter-of-factly, and the reference did not seem to support the argument if you knew it was a fictional character.
> Also why is "trust" at stake here?
Because the internet is full of ignorant ramblings (moreso with the LLMs), and you have to be aware of it and detect it in order not to fill your own mind with irrelevant nonsense.