Ahab's Leg Dilemma | Hacker News Reader

Ahab's Leg Dilemma

allvisibleobjects.substack.com

42 pointssignor_bosco46 comments

Looks like there’s two follow-up articles to this:

https://allvisibleobjects.substack.com/p/the-leg-dilemma-par...

https://allvisibleobjects.substack.com/p/extracts-ahabs-leg-...

If going North, with a wind blowing from West to East, wouldn't the windward side be on the port side, not the starboard side? I must be doing something obviously wrong early in the morning since the writer says it's going the other way.

That's a typo in conclusion 1, the wind is blowing east to west as it says just above. "the gale comes from the eastward"

Oh thank you! That makes sense, reading back.

If you haven’t read Moby Dick, you really should. It’s impressive in a way that modern literature just misses entirely. It is simply an incredible piece of work.

But – try to read it on a long trip, or during an airplane ride. It is not the kind of work you should rush through. Personally I read it on a series of 10+ hour airplane rides, which was the perfect environment IMO, perhaps only second to a weeks-long sailing trip.

One thing though that I really want to stress to people is stick through it until the end, but don't try to rush getting there either. 90% of the book is just learning about whaling, which necessarily involves learning about whales and also whalers. However, the end of the book takes on a completely different tone and is borderline modern literature.

Available on Project Gutenberg: https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/2701

I haven't compared the two, but I think Standard Ebooks' edition is probably better formatted.

https://standardebooks.org/ebooks/herman-melville/moby-dick

Yeah, that's kind of what Standard Ebook's whole deal is -- they have only a small fraction of the number of books Project Gutenberg has, but they spend a lot of time making the ones they have pretty -- often better than even commercial e-books.

Oh, nice. I didn't know about them.

Thanks!

It goes on a bit though. Lots of digressions, some boring - the one that sticks in my mind is the lengthy justification for calling a whale a "fish".

That is kind of my point, though: don't read it if you're worried about "boring" digressions. You won't like it. Read it when you have enough time to slowly appreciate every chapter. You have to completely silence the part of your mind that wants action and progression of the storyline.

Then I would prefer to read Too Like Lightning instead. I found Moby Dick to be interminably boring.

Counterpoint for anyone out there trying to decide if they should read it: Don't. Life is short, do things in a way you think makes sense, not because some dude on the internet said it <(Irony lives here).

Fuck the classics. No seriously, that's my stance: Who cares? I know people who spend time and energy culturing themselves and many of them are absolutely boring at parties.

The world has no purpose or meaning except what you conjure up yourself or subscribe to by choice. Never read another book again, ever. Only read classical Greek philosophy. Only read the side of cereal boxes. The rules are made up and the points don't matter.

>Counterpoint for anyone out there trying to decide if they should read it: Don't. Life is short, do things in a way you think makes sense, not because some dude on the internet said it <(Irony lives here).

Counterpoint to the counterpoint: do it. Don't live life as an automaton. Broaden your horizons. Venture outside your comfort zone and expand your culture outside quick entertainment.

Not convinced? Well, go binge watch the Nth streaming/cable series, watch the Nth MCU movie, and be content with what you're fed by cynical media moguls and assumed to like because that's your station in life as an average Joe. See if I care...

I mean, you don't need to take my opinion for it. I am just a dude on the Internet, although I do have a little blog about the arts, so I guess I'm marginally more qualified than just a random person? I'll let you decide.

But a whole lot of very intelligent people that know a lot about literature have very good things to say about Moby Dick. To disregard their collective opinions in favor of reading whatever makes you exciting at parties [0] doesn't seem like a wise choice to me.

For example:

- Hubert Dreyfus lecturing about MD for 8 hours: https://youtu.be/eq5LDSZDr2E?si=pBlpoHH14ByTlE5o

- Harold Bloom on MD: https://youtu.be/xFt59_E_g5s?si=oORJveHu2hs3cW8n

- EL Doctorow: https://youtu.be/rzFr5PNE5pE?si=PvPowjQPWbglayQH

0. I'm curious what that is, actually. Do you have some suggestions?

Not OP. I’ve personally never read Moby Dick — been meaning to at some point — but I don’t see any purpose in continuing to slog through a book that you find interminably boring. It’s just a cargo cult mentality of becoming “cultured”.

My world expanded quite a bit when I realized that not all the classics were worth anything to me, and that some works that people turn their noses up at are far more valuable culturally.

It's Harpoon Hacker News

I'm always impressed how someone goes on to try to find an answer for something that ultimately isn't all that important in the grand scheme of things. Nevertheless I find myself fascinating by this author's journey to figure this detail out.

Don't forget that Euler invented graph theory to solve an inconsequential riddle (the Bridges of Konigsberg).

For any curious - an English translation of Solutio problematis ad geometriam situs pertinensis - https://www.cantab.net/users/michael.behrend/repubs/maze_mat...

Not really. Euler was inspired by the trivial riddle to create graph theory. Graph theory answered many, many interesting questions.

I'm afraid I'm not sure where you're differing from what I said! He invented graph theory to solve the riddle. It was later used to solve other problems as well. It's not clear to me that Euler knew of the myriad possible applications, but would be happy to be shown wrong.

"Inventing graph theory" is a tiny task. He just took a map and simplified the visual presentation. All the work of the theory comes after that one little problem. It wasn't a big journey like this thread starter is talking about.

You can see it in the short paper, where most of the length is due to the lack of algebraic notation, and there's nothing there to generalize to answer other questions about graphs.

Just because the paper is short, doesn't mean that Euler didn't spend significant time and effort dreaming up the solution. If it was a tiny task, someone else would have done it already.

Investigating details that are not “all that important” is I would argue what makes Moby Dick a masterpiece. Many are bored to death by whaling details and look to “improve” Melville’s work by cutting that out and keeping only the “plot”. However, buried within all the whaling details is the narrator looking deeply into all things, trying to find the purpose and point of it all, to see if he can ascertain some truth. He’ll offer some conclusions one chapter, only to contradict them the next. What is truth? What’s the point of this all? This tool, this skill, this ship, this life, this world? Melville doesn’t offer any explicit answers, which is another reason it is a brilliant novel as it forces the reader to come to their own conclusions. And, in the end, even with some conclusions formed we witness the mini-apocalypse at the end of the novel in which our narrator is saved by mere chance (or is it), by the mortifications of a “alien” friend. Our narrator investigates everything deeply, only to find he goes on by the grace of others. And of course, all this is not even to mention we simultaneously having Ahab trying to pierce the very veil of God as a subplot…a true work of genius!

Warning: wrestling is required with this novel.

In the grand scheme of things at a cosmic scale, every human endeavor is a hunt to know which of Ahab's legs was missing.

When the last echoes of humanity have been silenced and all trace of us gone from memory, nobody can care if you spent your time trying to figure out a cure for cancer or whether a fictional character would have liked chocolate cake.

Congrats, you unlocked the level 2 video : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ex74x_gqTU0

My problem with these unimportant analyses is they can never be right or wrong. Its anti-climatic; They are forming yet another opinion.

That's Ahab's Leg Dilemma Dilemma: we have to choose between answerable uninteresting questions, or unanswerable interesting questions. And we often don't know in advance if there is an answer.

Going down the rabbit hole on minutiae like this is a joy to research and read.

Had Melville known about the very strong clicks that sperm whales can produce he probably could have woken in it as an interesting motif, e.g. MB "talking" to Ahab or other sailors or killing them with his clicks: https://www.reddit.com/r/ClassicBookClub/comments/phhs5v/mob...

After I read this, a tangential thought occurred to me: which hand and which finger does the One Ring go? Luckily that's specified more in the LoTR books: https://www.reddit.com/r/tolkienfans/comments/2ia4a0/which_f..., https://scifi.stackexchange.com/questions/13810/why-was-the-....

Ringwise, I think marriages just got a lot more fun!

"SegaIrraM" in Parseltongue

Or tho I think it would thound...

¡Viva Catalonia!

This is addressed in pop culture in the movie Young Frankenstein, regarding Igor's hunchback.

“What hump?”

At first, I thought Ahab's Leg Dilemma might ask something like if a person replaces parts of their body with whalebone, at what point, if any, does that person stop being the original person?

Things don't really have objectively defined, innate identities, so we may introduce whatever definition (or definitions) of identity we find most useful in practical applications.

You may be thinking of Theseus' Ship:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ship_of_Theseus

Yeah, that's what I was riffing off of, being too unoriginal to come up with my own ;)

A related problem is the 'sorites paradox'.

>A typical formulation involves a heap of sand, from which grains are removed individually. With the assumption that removing a single grain does not cause a heap to become a non-heap, the paradox is to consider what happens when the process is repeated enough times that only one grain remains: is it still a heap? If not, when did it change from a heap to a non-heap?

It's a mystery, not a dilemma.

If which leg isn't mentioned than they can get any actor actually missing a leg (any leg) to play the part in a play/movie. Might be on purpose it wasn't mentioned.

"Captain Ahab, from Herman Melville's novel "Moby-Dick," is missing his left leg, which was bitten off by the white whale, Moby Dick, at the knee."

According to ChatGPT.

The follow-up, when I asked "why do you think so":

My statement that Captain Ahab is missing his left leg is based on common interpretations and summaries of Herman Melville's "Moby-Dick." However, upon reflection, I realize that specific textual evidence is crucial for such details. In the novel, Melville describes how Ahab's leg was taken by the whale, and Ahab uses a whalebone prosthesis as a replacement. The narrative provides vivid descriptions of Ahab's movements and the implications of his injury, which significantly affects his character and actions throughout the story.

To accurately determine which leg Ahab is missing, one would need to consult the text of "Moby-Dick" directly. My previous response was based on a general understanding of the novel and its character, but I acknowledge the importance of textual accuracy, especially with classic literature. If the text specifically states which leg was lost or implies it through Ahab's actions or descriptions, that would be the definitive source.

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