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Comment by npb | Hacker News Reader

I was reading this today, and it's surprisingly relevant to your comment.

How to Deconstruct Almost Anything--My Postmodern Adventure http://www.info.ucl.ac.be/~pvr/decon.html

While I can agree with some of what is said in that article, the writer exhibits not only massive ignorance, but a basic misunderstanding of the premise. Because I studied both mathematics and history at university, I am very familiar with the mutual contempt people of those "two worlds" have for one another, but I think the reason for it that they don't understand the premise of the other discipline: namely the axioms and the purpose. An HN comment is not the place to discuss this at length, but very briefly, the humanities and the exact sciences have different understandings of the concept of "truth". In the exact sciences, truth is a model of reality that agrees with observations. In the humanities, truth is anything that can give us pause, make us think about ourselves and look at the world in different ways. For example, in the exact sciences, the statement "the moon is made of cheese" is simply false. It is disproved by observation. In the humanities, it could be "true" if you can imbue it with meaning that enriches you. If it makes you ponder the significance of the moon, or of cheese, to your life, and if it makes you consider an idea like "the moon", which may be something beautiful but far away, is actually made of cheese, a mundane substance, then the statement can be true.

In short, neither scientists/mathematicians/engineers nor historians/literary critics are stupid (well, most of them aren't). If this is your starting point, then if before dismissing the other discipline you realize that it's being studied by smart people who know what they're doing, and give yourself time to understand the premise, you might actually learn something. The writer of that article simply does not have the tools necessary to determine whether a "reading" is bogus or not, because he does not know what "non-bogus" or "true" is in the framework he has tried to explore.

Having said that, there was very little deconstruction in my interpretation of "don't be evil". In fact, I think it's a pretty straightforward interpretation once you've decided to interpret the motto seriously. It is a literary failure on my part to interpret it so unimaginatively, but it's only meant as a starting point.

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