4 ms·

PG and idlewords had it out in the comment section here: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=984475 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=984475 PG definitely ge

PG and idlewords had it out in the comment section here: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=984475 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=984475 PG definitely gets the best of the argument, IMO.

tptacek 17y ago
From Maciej: As for 1, Aaron Swartz sent us both this quote the first time you and I had this argument, and I'm surprised you've forgotten it. It's from Graham Larkin, curator of the National Gallery of Canada, whom he asked to adjudicate your claim: ""By even the most conservative standards (which your buddy seem to be applying), you'd need to go at least a few decades further, into the High Renaissance. Julius II's didn't even start commissioning Michelangelo's Sistine Ceiling and Raphael's Vatican Stanze (School of Athens &c) didn't start until 1508. These works don't exactly represent a decline, except by Preraphealite standards which would judge them as over-sophisitcated and lacking in primitive simplicity. (That's IT: your friend's a Preraphaelite! Well history is not on his or her side; such Victorian predilections are a mere blip in the history of Western aesthetics.) The generation after the giant Raphael (and the giant Durer in the North) is a much better candidate for cultural and artistic decline--a story complicated by Michaelangelo's inconvenient longevity. Historians have often pointed to the 1527 Sack of Rome as a downturn in artistic ferment, or at least in the unparalleled ascendancy of Italy. I would add that Western painting of around 1500 can scarcely be separated from the other visual arts, including the still-young (to the West) technology of print, brought to incredible levels of sophistication by Durer and others in precisely the post-1500 decades. One wonders whether your friend meant "1500" or "like, 1500."" I don't know who got the better half of the argument but I'm unprepared to respond to the curator of the National Gallery of Canada, enjoined to resolve an Internet message board argument, by suggesting that Maciej simply wrote copy that made sense to people who know nothing about art. Again: I have no idea who's right or wrong in this "debate", but I find it fascinating, and I found Maciej's "essay" a joy to read. It was stylish, it was fun, it got me to buy that Minnaert book for my wife which earned me huge relationship points, and now I can at least tell you who Hals is.
- pg 17y ago
  I hesitate to wade into this dispute again, but what this curator says doesn't contradict what I wrote. In fact, I agree with him. What I wrote in H&P was "The paintings made between 1430 and 1500 are still unsurpassed." I didn't say that nothing after was as good as the work of that period, just that nothing after was better. I thought carefully about that sentence when I wrote it. If I'd meant to say that the fifteenth century represented a peak no one since had attained, I would have written that. I didn't because (a) it's probably not true, and (b) that wasn't the point I was trying to make. If you go back and read the part of the essay where I said this, the point I was making was that in some fields, some of the best work is done very early on; that instead of the slow buildup you might expect, people are so excited about the new possibilities that work in the field reaches "cruising altitude" almost immediately. To refute what I actually wrote, someone would have to produce something made after 1500 that they were willing to claim was better than everything made between 1430 and 1500. Not just as good, but better. That's not what our curator is claiming, and I doubt you could find any art historian who would.
  - idlewords 17y ago
    You've now tied yourself in the curious knot of claiming that there are some paintings created after 1500 that are exactly as good as the best works of the earlier era, but no better, and that that's what you meant to say all along. What's particularly weird about this argument is that is would not affect your essay at all to concede that, say, the period called the 'Golden Age of Dutch Painting', or the Golden Age of Spanish Painting, or one of the several other periods that art historians (inconveniently for you) commonly refer to as Golden ages of painting produced better work that the somewhat fussy and stylized paintings of the Renaissance, and that you just got excited because you really like Leonardo. But you seem unwilling to back down from any claim once you've made it in print, no matter how silly ("Cezanne couldn't draw!"), and so we get this peculiar kind of weaseling. Western art, like Western music or mathematics, is a cumulative enterprise, but you've done the equivalent of claiming Pythagoras was the best mathematician ever, and as evidence pointing to the fact that no serious historian of mathematics has ever said in print that Pythagoras was a worse mathematician than Euler or Gauss, when it would not occur to anyone else to think in those terms. Apart from the fact that this is just blatant argument from authority ("no art historian would disagree with me! Not even this one, who just disagreed!"), it also a disservice to your readers, who are taking it on faith that you know what you are talking about. As Aaron's correspondence demonstrates, when someone finally does corner an art historian, and bends the poor guy's mind into thinking of the history of Western painting in the same weird categories you do, he'll politely say that you're completely full of it. Not being an expert in philosophy, or economic history, or the trade union movement, but being a longtime student of your writing style, I suspect the same thing would happen in those fields. I just happen to know art history, so when you write about that I can poke the holes myself. You've been coasting on the fact that most of your readers are technical people who will take the analogies you strip-mine from the humanities at face value because of their respect for you as a clever guy. You can probably continue coasting on it for the remainder of your career. But I think you'll find that a little more humility, intellectual honesty and the confidence to abandon the occasional overeager metaphor, rather than trying at all costs to defend it, would make you an even better writer than you think you are now. Maybe not a better writer than EB White, but possibly exactly as good.
ubernostrum 17y ago
I've debated taking PG to task over this one: http://www.paulgraham.com/philosophy.html http://www.paulgraham.com/philosophy.html But I figure I don't need the internet drama, and I already find amusing ways to exercise my philosophy degree.
- ntoshev 17y ago
  "debated taking PG to task"? Why don't you just say what you disagree with, no need to make internet drama or necessarily get pg to respond to you. I have studied quite a bit of philosophy and I like this essay a lot, so I would be interested in reading a good criticism (please, please do better than idlewords, it is clearly personal for him).
  - ubernostrum 17y ago
    Well, the opening bits about confusion of language and what to call things are a bit... fuzzy :) Yes, Wittgenstein focused a lot on language, but so did a lot of his contemporaries -- that's a large part of what positivism was all about. And the idea that coming up with correct and precise terms and categories as a first step goes at least all the way back to Aristotle in the Western tradition and Confucius in the Eastern. But pg doesn't mention any of this, he just name-drops Wittgenstein and gives you the impression that this is some sort of modern thing to do. On the history of philosophy, I've got to mark pg down quite a lot for outright ignoring the pre-Socratics. Do we only have fragments of their work? Yes. Does that mean we get to write them off as "speculative cosmology"? Hell, no. Plato and Aristotle don't make sense unless you consider them in the context of the philosophers who came before them, primarily the Elean and Milesian schools. And I can't understand why someone who writes so much about entrepreneurship would willingly ignore Thales (unless it's to sweep under the rug the fact that Thales -- though he could and did apply his analytic and philosophical techniques to make money -- didn't seem to care much about practical results and in fact did more than a few things to spite and shame people who wanted such results). I'm going to gloss over pg's interpretation of Aristotle and simply recommend that people actually read Aristotle, or at least well-prepared exegesis of Aristotle; that's a topic too large to tackle in a comment. But talking about the next 1500 years' worth of philosophy just aping Plato and Aristotle without doing any critical thinking is, well, flat-out wrong. Aristotle was indeed highly regarded by later medieval thinkers -- after about the eleventh century AD or so -- but he was far from the only game in town until that point, and most of the regard for his work and Plato's wasn't due to slavish repetition of muddled thinking: medieval philosophers simply didn't have the kind of access to classical work that we enjoy today, and so they used what material they had. From there, pg goes off into what looks like his own flight of unthinking hero-worship, but this one's centered on Wittgenstein. Yes, Wittgenstein's important, but he was far from the first person to discover "that most previous philosophy was a waste of time". One suspects that pg has never read, or has forgotten what he read in, Hume, who delivered the real kick in the pants about two centuries earlier (and quite a bit of Hume's most interesting work had been anticipated in antiquity -- the same antiquity which, pg tells us, was far too muddled and concerned with "big generalities" to produce useful or interesting work). (aside: I think this, more than anything, is what bothers me about pg's summary of philosophy: you don't get to condense Western philosophy into a single essay without even mentioning Hume's name. He even goes so far as to attribute to Kant honors which -- and if you've read Kant you'll see even he felt this way -- rightly belong to Hume.) Finally, pg ends up at a "proposal" which, so far as I can tell, is identical to the classical pragmatism of William James (whose name is also conspicuously absent from the essay). He rounds this up by reiterating the falsehood that everybody else was just aping Plato and Aristotle for a couple millennia (perhaps pg simply misunderstood a famous quote from Alfred North Whitehead, and took a literal interpretation). So, basically, pg's spent a lot of time pouring out a "sea of words" riddled with historical inaccuracies and omissions, and used it all to advocate as new a philosophy which has been well-known for over a century. This is not something of which I can approve :)

PG and idlewords had it out in the comment section here: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=984475 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=984475 PG definitely gets the best of the argument, IMO.

tptacek 17y ago

From Maciej: As for 1, Aaron Swartz sent us both this quote the first time you and I had this argument, and I'm surprised you've forgotten it. It's from Graham Larkin, curator of the National Gallery of Canada, whom he asked to adjudicate your claim: ""By even the most conservative standards (which your buddy seem to be applying), you'd need to go at least a few decades further, into the High Renaissance. Julius II's didn't even start commissioning Michelangelo's Sistine Ceiling and Raphael's Vatican Stanze (School of Athens &c) didn't start until 1508. These works don't exactly represent a decline, except by Preraphealite standards which would judge them as over-sophisitcated and lacking in primitive simplicity. (That's IT: your friend's a Preraphaelite! Well history is not on his or her side; such Victorian predilections are a mere blip in the history of Western aesthetics.) The generation after the giant Raphael (and the giant Durer in the North) is a much better candidate for cultural and artistic decline--a story complicated by Michaelangelo's inconvenient longevity. Historians have often pointed to the 1527 Sack of Rome as a downturn in artistic ferment, or at least in the unparalleled ascendancy of Italy. I would add that Western painting of around 1500 can scarcely be separated from the other visual arts, including the still-young (to the West) technology of print, brought to incredible levels of sophistication by Durer and others in precisely the post-1500 decades. One wonders whether your friend meant "1500" or "like, 1500."" I don't know who got the better half of the argument but I'm unprepared to respond to the curator of the National Gallery of Canada, enjoined to resolve an Internet message board argument, by suggesting that Maciej simply wrote copy that made sense to people who know nothing about art. Again: I have no idea who's right or wrong in this "debate", but I find it fascinating, and I found Maciej's "essay" a joy to read. It was stylish, it was fun, it got me to buy that Minnaert book for my wife which earned me huge relationship points, and now I can at least tell you who Hals is.

pg 17y ago
I hesitate to wade into this dispute again, but what this curator says doesn't contradict what I wrote. In fact, I agree with him. What I wrote in H&P was "The paintings made between 1430 and 1500 are still unsurpassed." I didn't say that nothing after was as good as the work of that period, just that nothing after was better. I thought carefully about that sentence when I wrote it. If I'd meant to say that the fifteenth century represented a peak no one since had attained, I would have written that. I didn't because (a) it's probably not true, and (b) that wasn't the point I was trying to make. If you go back and read the part of the essay where I said this, the point I was making was that in some fields, some of the best work is done very early on; that instead of the slow buildup you might expect, people are so excited about the new possibilities that work in the field reaches "cruising altitude" almost immediately. To refute what I actually wrote, someone would have to produce something made after 1500 that they were willing to claim was better than everything made between 1430 and 1500. Not just as good, but better. That's not what our curator is claiming, and I doubt you could find any art historian who would.
- idlewords 17y ago
  You've now tied yourself in the curious knot of claiming that there are some paintings created after 1500 that are exactly as good as the best works of the earlier era, but no better, and that that's what you meant to say all along. What's particularly weird about this argument is that is would not affect your essay at all to concede that, say, the period called the 'Golden Age of Dutch Painting', or the Golden Age of Spanish Painting, or one of the several other periods that art historians (inconveniently for you) commonly refer to as Golden ages of painting produced better work that the somewhat fussy and stylized paintings of the Renaissance, and that you just got excited because you really like Leonardo. But you seem unwilling to back down from any claim once you've made it in print, no matter how silly ("Cezanne couldn't draw!"), and so we get this peculiar kind of weaseling. Western art, like Western music or mathematics, is a cumulative enterprise, but you've done the equivalent of claiming Pythagoras was the best mathematician ever, and as evidence pointing to the fact that no serious historian of mathematics has ever said in print that Pythagoras was a worse mathematician than Euler or Gauss, when it would not occur to anyone else to think in those terms. Apart from the fact that this is just blatant argument from authority ("no art historian would disagree with me! Not even this one, who just disagreed!"), it also a disservice to your readers, who are taking it on faith that you know what you are talking about. As Aaron's correspondence demonstrates, when someone finally does corner an art historian, and bends the poor guy's mind into thinking of the history of Western painting in the same weird categories you do, he'll politely say that you're completely full of it. Not being an expert in philosophy, or economic history, or the trade union movement, but being a longtime student of your writing style, I suspect the same thing would happen in those fields. I just happen to know art history, so when you write about that I can poke the holes myself. You've been coasting on the fact that most of your readers are technical people who will take the analogies you strip-mine from the humanities at face value because of their respect for you as a clever guy. You can probably continue coasting on it for the remainder of your career. But I think you'll find that a little more humility, intellectual honesty and the confidence to abandon the occasional overeager metaphor, rather than trying at all costs to defend it, would make you an even better writer than you think you are now. Maybe not a better writer than EB White, but possibly exactly as good.

ubernostrum 17y ago

I've debated taking PG to task over this one: http://www.paulgraham.com/philosophy.html http://www.paulgraham.com/philosophy.html But I figure I don't need the internet drama, and I already find amusing ways to exercise my philosophy degree.

ntoshev 17y ago
"debated taking PG to task"? Why don't you just say what you disagree with, no need to make internet drama or necessarily get pg to respond to you. I have studied quite a bit of philosophy and I like this essay a lot, so I would be interested in reading a good criticism (please, please do better than idlewords, it is clearly personal for him).
- ubernostrum 17y ago
  Well, the opening bits about confusion of language and what to call things are a bit... fuzzy :) Yes, Wittgenstein focused a lot on language, but so did a lot of his contemporaries -- that's a large part of what positivism was all about. And the idea that coming up with correct and precise terms and categories as a first step goes at least all the way back to Aristotle in the Western tradition and Confucius in the Eastern. But pg doesn't mention any of this, he just name-drops Wittgenstein and gives you the impression that this is some sort of modern thing to do. On the history of philosophy, I've got to mark pg down quite a lot for outright ignoring the pre-Socratics. Do we only have fragments of their work? Yes. Does that mean we get to write them off as "speculative cosmology"? Hell, no. Plato and Aristotle don't make sense unless you consider them in the context of the philosophers who came before them, primarily the Elean and Milesian schools. And I can't understand why someone who writes so much about entrepreneurship would willingly ignore Thales (unless it's to sweep under the rug the fact that Thales -- though he could and did apply his analytic and philosophical techniques to make money -- didn't seem to care much about practical results and in fact did more than a few things to spite and shame people who wanted such results). I'm going to gloss over pg's interpretation of Aristotle and simply recommend that people actually read Aristotle, or at least well-prepared exegesis of Aristotle; that's a topic too large to tackle in a comment. But talking about the next 1500 years' worth of philosophy just aping Plato and Aristotle without doing any critical thinking is, well, flat-out wrong. Aristotle was indeed highly regarded by later medieval thinkers -- after about the eleventh century AD or so -- but he was far from the only game in town until that point, and most of the regard for his work and Plato's wasn't due to slavish repetition of muddled thinking: medieval philosophers simply didn't have the kind of access to classical work that we enjoy today, and so they used what material they had. From there, pg goes off into what looks like his own flight of unthinking hero-worship, but this one's centered on Wittgenstein. Yes, Wittgenstein's important, but he was far from the first person to discover "that most previous philosophy was a waste of time". One suspects that pg has never read, or has forgotten what he read in, Hume, who delivered the real kick in the pants about two centuries earlier (and quite a bit of Hume's most interesting work had been anticipated in antiquity -- the same antiquity which, pg tells us, was far too muddled and concerned with "big generalities" to produce useful or interesting work). (aside: I think this, more than anything, is what bothers me about pg's summary of philosophy: you don't get to condense Western philosophy into a single essay without even mentioning Hume's name. He even goes so far as to attribute to Kant honors which -- and if you've read Kant you'll see even he felt this way -- rightly belong to Hume.) Finally, pg ends up at a "proposal" which, so far as I can tell, is identical to the classical pragmatism of William James (whose name is also conspicuously absent from the essay). He rounds this up by reiterating the falsehood that everybody else was just aping Plato and Aristotle for a couple millennia (perhaps pg simply misunderstood a famous quote from Alfred North Whitehead, and took a literal interpretation). So, basically, pg's spent a lot of time pouring out a "sea of words" riddled with historical inaccuracies and omissions, and used it all to advocate as new a philosophy which has been well-known for over a century. This is not something of which I can approve :)