The alluring danger of dilettantism | Hacker News Reader

The alluring danger of dilettantism

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26 pointsdanw22 comments

Am I the only one thriving in this environment or something?

Some nights I play Bioshock. Some nights I work on my (hopefully innovative) Haskell project. Some nights I watch a movie and some nights I write for my blog. Sometimes at work I listen to music and sometimes I just buckle down and code. I've been fighting with distraction lately, but with some success.

I like my life much better now than 20 years ago, when I was in (very easy) school, had tons of free time, and hardly anything to do with it but read books and play video games because even my local library had hardly any resources that would teach me how to do anything. (Oh, if only I had found a primer on writing assembler for my computer...)

I will say, though, that getting off the marketing treadmill is very important. I just canceled my cable in favor of an electronic video approach with a special emphasis on not getting advertised at anymore (in particular I just had a son, and I want him to grow up in an environment not shared with whatever multi-billion dollar company buys its way into my house), and while I don't run adblock in my browser, NoScript comes close enough for practical purposes. I now pay only minimal attention to things like gaming news, because it's way better to find out something cool came out a year ago ($15) then to anxiously await something coming out in six months ($60). The only reason I pay any attention at all is my taste for games that are only on the shelves for a week (thanks, Atlus).

But with that proviso, what we have here is an abundance of wealth, and I for one prefer the problems of wealth to the problems of poverty. If you have a problem, deal with it. No, seriously, deal with it, whatever it takes. Because it's not likely to get much better, barring total social collapse. Even the recession/depression at most will slow down the production of new distractions.

> Oh, if only I had found a primer on writing assembler for > my computer...

This is a regret of my childhood. So much time, and if only I'd had a good mentor for programming or music I'd have moved much further forward by now (and probably missed the angry young man stage as well).

Startup idea: simple mentoring site that aims to connect mentors in any topic with students in any topic. Can be free or commercial, can be regional or local, it's expected that both the student and mentor will need to pass some sort of test to be accepted. Students and mentors are reviewed.

Agreed. Many of us that are children of the 80's are obviously and woefully self-bootstrapped into the compsci and compeng industry. It really shows, compared to a lot of kids who are up-and-coming stars who already have mastery in subjects I haven't even had time to diversify into.

But there is so much more to do than consume media. The world needs more people who can, or rather, will (there are plenty who can, few who do) solve problems from the local to the global. They don't disappear when we disappear into our games, movies, music, and books.

Indulging in these things every once in a while is fine, but the cultural status quo is to let it consume all our time barring work and family responsibilities.

Did you read what I said, or just assume I was disagreeing?

Part of my point is that mere abundance doesn't imply a need to do nothing but consume, and I don't. Blaming the abundance is blaming the wrong thing, and wishing for poverty because you can't handle wealth is really shortsighted. The correct solution is to learn to deal with it. On the grand scale of problems, this hardly rates a kvetching.

And I posted my contrary post because everybody seems to be just smiling and nodding... "yup, cultural wealth, sure does suck..." I don't care how fashionable that attitude is, it's stupid. Along with the wealth of conumption opportunities are opportunities to produce, and a programming website of all places to not make that connection is just lame. How many of us would still be programming if cost-of-entry was $100,000?

I may not have read it as carefully as I should have. But I insist that there is more to life than both consumption and production. There is civic engagement. There is activism, no matter what your political philosophy.

I had a philosophy professor my sophomore year that was so against consumerism, marketing, advertising, corporations, etc. that he wouldn't even wear branded clothing. He made a point during class to explain how he never watched commercials on TV to avoid being brainwashed by the evil corporations.

This professor was too naive to realize that these evil corporations he so despised were the ones paying his salary, giving him the opportunity to sit around and read philosophy all day.

All the students just thought he was weird and pretentious.

Instead of sheltering your kid, why don't you teach him how the world works instead? Educate him to make his own judgments when it comes to marketing and advertising.

I don't think he was naive. Philosophers think quite a bit about what it means to create for yourself a bubble of X in a larger sphere of anti-X: living a meaningful life when life is finite and all memory of you will be eventually erased, for example. Just because death allowed for the natural selection that evolved humanity doesn't mean that you can't be against it. Just because corporations created the opportunity for him to thrive, doesn't mean he can't speak out against them.

For another example, just because the GPL is a work of copyright law doesn't mean its goal is not to abolish copyright law. The professor knows that the more students he influences toward anti-consumerism, the closer he'll get to living in a socialist world where he can sit around and read philosophy all day. Or maybe he won't need to; philosophers are really only needed to answer existential questions and problems--if they managed somehow to perfect the world, their job would be "done", similar to a doctor in a world where no one falls ill.

Note that this has nothing to do with my own opinions. I like advertisements, strangely enough; I find they make television and radio feel "connected" to reality, in a temporal sense, in a way that just downloading old TV series and podcasts don't. It's the difference between an airlock and an open window; I feel "stuffy"--out of sync with the world--when I don't hear anyone telling me what brand of laundry detergent I should be robotically consuming.

To change the subject, the real problem with the abundance of wealth is the abundance of debt that accompanies it.

I have a mate who's a solid pianist and guitarist, and he plays guitar hero too.

Like me, he's skeptical of academic types who try and steer every detail of the little people's lives with grand-plan political philosophies.

This Jon Elster character sounds like a tripper. In one of the quotes he uses the idea of 'marginal utility' to further an argument. The quote is taken from a book about (and by a broad proponent of) Marxism. Much of Marxism is built on the labour theory of value, which proponents of marginalism believe to be discredited by the marginal theory of value, which is tightly derived from the idea of marginal utility.

I haven't read any of Elster's work. All the same, I'm confident there's some rigorous turd-polishing going on between the pages of that volume. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jon_Elster

Update: I may be selling him short. There seems to be a lot written by this under the topic of 'Analytical Marxism', including that "Elster and Przeworski were notable departures from the group in the early 1990s.". I've heard friends recount stories from professors about the period that say that buying into Marxism was in some circles had a similar dynamic to baptism in born-again Christian circles. In that respect I suppose that pattern of trying to bring more sense to loved themes is no better or worse than Catholicism. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Analytical_Marxism I'm now miles out of my league and this will be my last edit here.

This is a really dumb article. Guitar Hero is popular in large part because it is social. One person might want to learn a guitar. A whole room full of buzzed people do not. I can think of few things less social than sitting in a room developing callouses while trying to nail barre chords.

My brother is a professional guitarist, and he's the one that brings (well, Rock Band) on the holidays.

What's the rest of the evidence that society is avoiding difficulty? Are fewer people becoming doctors or engineers?

What's the rest of the evidence that society is avoiding difficulty? Are fewer people becoming doctors or engineers?

For a while, a lot of talented people were piling into the financial industry, which is (was?) the only industry in which it's possible to be entirely mediocre and make $1m/year within a decade. The horrific collapse of the academic job market was a contributor to this trend.

However, I don't think the desire to make large sums of money with modest effort is a new feature of our "hyperdiverse" economy. It's a rather mundane result of human nature.

A lot of those people were only going into EECS to make easy money too; many of them were only going to stay for 2-5 years before coming back for an MBA or a law degree to go after IP law.

I guess the simple question is, are there fewer people going in to medicine now? It's incredibly difficult to become a doctor.

I can say from my experience that while it's not Guitar Hero or Rock Band that keeps me from practicing guitar, the author's example of psychedelic music is an apt one. The sheer amount of guitar material available to me is almost paralyzing. There really is no scarcity to help motivate me. I'm borrowing my friend's guitar and he burned a couple instructional DVDs for me. There are tabs online for just about any song you can think of. There are hundreds of instructional and example videos on YouTube. When I plug the guitar into my Mac I've already got a little recording studio and an amp with more settings than I care to know about and 30 different guitars.

It's never been easier to learn guitar. Except that for some reason the ease of it all makes me take it for granted and even makes me bored. I'm just a quick search away from hundreds of videos of people who play better than I could ever hope to. Sometimes it feels like everyone and their dog already knows how to play except for me. While I ponder the futility of it, I get distracted by all the other neat stuff that I can learn.

I have to consciously fight laziness. There are so many easy and fun things to do nowadays that it takes some extra discipline to focus. I like to think I'm succeeding. Sometimes I start out working on my personal project and then a little while later here I am responding to someone's interesting comment on an interesting article.

There is an interesting problem in a society like this. I've lost too many friends and family to World of Warcraft to deny it. Perhaps it's not worse than the problems faced by earlier generations, but it's definitely different.

This is why there are guitar teachers, right?

Yeah... you aren't supposed to learn how to play music by yourself.

Guitar Hero is a bad example of the argument being made here. Guitar Center attributes a recent spike in sales from games like Guitar Hero inspiring players to learn the real thing and move beyond their video game introduction to music. http://www.edge-online.com/news/activision-guitar-hero-iii-p...

There's a good point there, if you can get through the awful writing that it's wrapped in.

It's just too easy to play a video game or read a blog post instead of write code. And in the short run it's more fun (if this isn't you, count yourself lucky). Three hours later you realize you've completely wasted an evening.

I have a friend who has natural musical talent. After watching him whip up on Guitar Hero, we talked about getting together to play actual guitar sometime. Maybe we will, maybe we won't, but I am quite sure we'll play GH again.

The lure of fake gratification and fake accomplishment is awfully hard to resist for a lot of us. It is a problem and worth talking about. Also I think we'll be able to figure out better ways of managing a world full of shiny fake rewards as we get more used to it.

What does the author define mastery to be? In the information age, with new tools like WebMD, a product of capitalism and a profit-driven corporation, we have greater knowledge of health and medicine than certified doctors in the past ever could have dreamed of having.

"eroding over time the sense that mastery is possible, or worth pursuing"

I fear spending a lot of time 'mastering' something meaningless. Music, woodwork, metalwork, drawing, painting, they all sound worth spending time on.

Spending several years mastering Cisco router operating system commands, Sharepoint internals and development, Microsoft Dynamics CRM, Java, Oracle, Jabber protocols, SGML/UML/YetAnotherMarkupLanguage? These don't sound fun, but they do sound like they'll take almost as much time and effort - but only because they were designed by big corporations/committees who don't care if you spend your life helping them profit until your 'skill' is suddenly worthless and non-transferrable.

Lisp and Haskell, on the other hand, I'd place closer to the "music, woodwork, ..., painting" category.

http://xkcd.com/359/

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