10 ms·

Thomas Jefferson's Letter to His Nephew Peter

112 points by najirama 16y ago

eitally 16y ago
It's amazing how much the wonders of technology and readily accessible information have screwed up the value many children in the past 3ish generations (my marker for the beginning of the decline is WWII reconstruction). A "renaissance man" now is a dilettante. In Jefferson's day it meant having both broad and deep knowledge. One could argue that the advances of science have made this impossible in modern times but I disagree. Regurgitating the fractured work of others isn't intelligence. Applying this information as a tool to advance oneself and the human good is the goal of education. Most children not only don't get this, they aren't even being taught the basic building blocks. I think this is the biggest incentive for the non-school movement, as well as the increase in other alternative [to governmental SOLs] programs. Those parents value an education for what it allows their children to contribute creatively, not just use the tools of others before them. I have exactly the same problem recruiting programmers. Like many large corporations we are primarily a Java & .Net shop and it is incredibly disappointing when 50% of the candidates can barely do more than drag controls out of the toolbox (<--- slight exaggeration, but not too much. I hire mostly in MX, BR, and IN and skilled folks are hard to come by. Ironically, this is usually because the cream are already working in the US/EU or earning US/EU pay in consulting gigs that are geography independent. Good for them.) My apologies for the rant, but this struck a nerve.
- hsmyers 16y ago
  The older we are the closer to the surface lies that nerve! Yours is not so much a rant as a much needed plea...
- patio11 16y ago
  "If you pay peanuts, you get monkeys."
  - eitally 16y ago
    Agreed 100% (it's not my choice.)
    - patio11 16y ago
      You have my sympathy. (Two years managing an outsourcing operation in India working from specs Bablefished from Japanese. And being told by my Indians that my translations were wrong because Babelfish, Yahoo, and Google outvoted me. And having to justify to management why I was billing months of overtime to debugging in a project where a math error would be national news and where RC1 was delivered in a state where it was literally impossible to pass your test unless you were deaf...)
      - eitally 16y ago
        I'm not sure if my situation is better or worse. In our case they don't even bother trying to clarify specs. :-)
- ryanwaggoner 16y ago
  It's amazing how much the wonders of technology and readily accessible information have screwed up the value many children in the past 3ish generations Can you clarify the relationship of technology and readily accessible information to the downfall of societal values? I don't necessarily disagree with the conclusion, but I'm curious as to how you came up with that as a hypothesis for the cause.
  - shantanubala 16y ago
    I don't speak for him, but here's my opinion. Since most information is just a quick web search away, most people have no incentive to actually absorb that information. Since we are constantly overloaded with information (and we're always connected to those sources of information -- email, IM, SMS, the news, etc.), we have to be extremely selective about the stuff we actually absorb. In the process, we lose absorption of the information that doesn't look good on the surface. For example, I was not very interested in physics until I started reading about Special and General Relativity. I wouldn't be able to understand those topics without learning boring and dry (in my opinion) Newtonian Mechanics first. In other words, we now usually only truly absorb stuff that looks good in the headline, rather than actually reading about it first. If we actually tried reading about all the stuff that's available, we'd be dead before we even got through a percent of it.
    - metamemetics 16y ago
      >Since most information is just a quick web search away, most people have no incentive to actually absorb that information. it's a moot point. In the 1700's we wouldn't have had access to the information anyway. Or even the money, time, and opportunities like aristocracy such as Jefferson had to buy books from London and study the smaller amount of knowledge available then. So rather than not having an incentive to absorb information X, we wouldn't have even known it existed! A large part of knowledge is knowing what you DON'T know. The truly dangerous individuals are idiots that think they know everything. Hopefully the web is making people realize that there are a lot of things out there they DON'T know. Decreasing anti-intelluctialism, provincialism, and narrow-mindedness. I would be ecstatic if more people got their news from the web than from television!
- btilly 16y ago
  A "renaissance man" now is a dilettante. In Jefferson's day it meant having both broad and deep knowledge. One could argue that the advances of science have made this impossible in modern times but I disagree. I believe you're being too fast to dismiss that argument. As is pointed out in http://www.its.caltech.edu/~dg/crunch_art.html http://www.its.caltech.edu/~dg/crunch_art.html, from Jefferson's day to relatively recently, the output in scientific journals increased 10-fold every 50 years. In Jefferson's day it was truly possible to learn what was known about all fields of science, and keep up with them all. Your knowledge could be broad and deep. But based on the sheer increase of volume, this soon became impossible. Today there are over 100,000 journals devoted to scientific research. Even if you read one page per second, every second, day and night, you would not even be scratching the surface of what is being produced. Regurgitating the fractured work of others isn't intelligence. Applying this information as a tool to advance oneself and the human good is the goal of education. Applying this information as a tool to advance oneself and the human good is the goal of education. This is a strong argument, but not necessarily for the point you are trying to make. Your argument leads to the point that we don't want students to just memorize random facts and regurgitate them. It does not lead to the point that it is possible to have both deep and broad knowledge about all fields. The challenge is that, thanks to the advances of science, today we both have more subjects to learn about (the "broad" is broader) and we know about them in more depth (the "deep" is deeper). This has made the ideal of having both broad and deep knowledge much, much harder. Hard enough that most conclude it is simply impossible.
  - _delirium 16y ago
    I do think breadth and depth have expanded, but I think fundamentally less than the explosion in page count would suggest. There has also been a big decrease in signal-to-noise ratio, with a lot of crap published in journals, and not enough gardening work. IMO a much bigger proportion of scientific resources need to be put into survey articles, "recent advances in X" retrospectives, post-intro-level textbooks and tutorials, and even ideally some cross-field work, matching up equivalent/redundant ideas and harmonizing terminology. In academia at least, the incentives don't encourage that, though: even though a survey article is probably the single quickest way to have significant impact on a field (they're widely read, and you're forging the lens through which many subsequent people will view that field), they're not as well respected for advancement purposes as even very niche original research is. As it is, tons of stuff keeps getting reinvented just because the state of the literature is so bad that you'll never find it, unless it was invented exactly in your sub-sub-specialty, or you serendipitously found it via a colleague who remarked that what you were doing sounded similar to something he once read. The decline in scientists writing books also doesn't help. It used to be that prominent scientists would gather up their scattered papers and unify them into a magnum opus laying out their theories, or possibly a few different books, one on each major area they worked on. That sometimes happens, especially in areas like cosmology, but it's much less the norm than it was 100 years ago. Today it's quite common to just publish 200+ papers over your career and not really do any summarization of them, even though there is plenty that could often be done, since it's common for papers to supersede or overlap with previous ones. Actually, on that front, it'd be a big win if scientists with lots of publications simply provided some sort of brief guide to them. Take the 50 papers on lasers, and provide an annotated bibliography explaining which papers are the important ones, which papers are obsolete or superseded, and which ones might be of particular interest to people working on particular topics. A few people do that, but many don't even separate their list of publications by topic, let alone provide a guide. Or, shorter: There is a lot of stuff published, but it's terribly indexed and summarized, which I think is a bigger problem than the volume alone.
- mmodahl 16y ago
  "Fortunately, literacy, though it consumes its own oral antecedants and, unless it is carefully monitored, even destroys their memory, is also infinitely adaptable. It can restore their memory, too." Ong, Walter J.. Orality and Literacy. New York: Routledge, 2003: 15. We need not limit our knowledge and view of the world to what fits in our brain. We do, however, need to make sure that what we are putting into our brain is useful to ourselves and to humanity; Up-Up-Down-Down-Left-Right-Left-Right-B-A-Start.
  - Gormo 16y ago
    If only that could give us 30x the retention and depth of understanding.
- metamemetics 16y ago
  >"renaissance man" now is a dilettante. In Jefferson's day it meant having both broad and deep knowledge. Jefferson's estimated net worth is $212 million. George Washington's is $525 million. It seems like you are comparing the values of a notably intelligent and published subset of the upper 1% aristocratic crust subset of society to the general population today. Hardly a fair comparison. You are railing against people for being dumb and yet have really bad proposals as to the cause. "It's the schools fault, let's do away with schools" "It's the kids' VALUES" You fail to consider that: 1. Intelligence is a distribution. There have always been dumb people and there always will be. 2. Economics. Blacks used to score significantly lower on IQ tests than whites in America. But guess what, the gap was directly proportional to the gap in poverty rate (http://www.huppi.com/kangaroo/L-IQgapgenetic.htm http://www.huppi.com/kangaroo/L-IQgapgenetic.htm). As the economic status of blacks in America improved the gap has decreased. If you want to compare the intelligence of groups of people large enough to account for outliers, the difference is always largely socioeconomic. Thus I will argue the OPPOSITE of your hypothesis is true: The wonders of technology and readily accessible information are the most important factor driving down global poverty, resulting in a higher percentage of the global population fulfilling a "Jeffersonian" ideal of the renaissance man with deep knowledge, whereas it was the time and opportunities and books to achieve that level of study was before confined to the aristocracy.
  - eitally 16y ago
    1. Intelligence is a distribution -- I don't disagree, but I also believe 99% of the population never realizes their potential, and in a lot of cases the educational system is the cause. 2. Yes, technology is driving down global poverty, but in the already privileged world I don't think this holds true. Where people want to learn they will find ways to do so. Where they are apathetic, they will find ways to remain ignorant.
- kiba 16y ago
  >>I think this is the biggest incentive for the non-school movement, as well as the increase in other alternative [to governmental SOLs] programs. Those parents value an education for what it allows their children to contribute creatively, not just use the tools of others before them. Apparently, you missed makerzine, maker faire, 3D printers, harry potter fanfiction, and hackaday. You also did not get the memo that people are actually becoming smarter over time. It's the Flynn's Effect. If you're going to whine about how the good old day are better, maybe you should show us some real evidence why this is actually so.
  - eitally 16y ago
    No, I didn't miss those things, nor have I missed other great stuff like the Khan Academy or MIT's OCW. My beef is with structured education -- especially in the US -- and the fact that the immediate gratification provided by technology hinders more than helps many children.
- wazoox 16y ago
  > A "renaissance man" now is a dilettante. I'm a proud dilettante. Heck, I've read all the books Jefferson mentioned :)
slay2k 16y ago
Awesome read, though Jefferson seems to have suffered from the "these are facts because I said so" type of thinking. Here are some relevant quotes: "Sitting up late at night is injurious to the health, and not useful to the mind." "Games played with the ball, and others of that nature, are too violent for the body, and stamp no character on the mind." "As to the species of exercise, I advise the gun. [snip] Let your gun therefore be the constant companion of your walks. [snip] Walking is the best possible exercise." That last one leaves me pondering what he's talking about, since he doesn't appear to be referring to hunting, unless it's the long-relaxing-walks-while-hunting kind.. Aside from that, I'm curious how much of the reading list will be doable these days without a solid grasp of Greek or Latin or French ? I kind of wanna give it a shot.
- forensic 16y ago
  >long-relaxing-walks-while-hunting kind yep. bird hunting i think.
  - simonsarris 16y ago
    Yeah this used to be pretty common, especially for schoolchildren for at least 100 years after Jefferson's time to "walk" home while hunting.
    - slay2k 16y ago
      Crazy. To what end, food on the table ? This would also imply the children took guns to school. Am I the only one who finds this rather insane ? Also, if you happen to have any links on the matter I'd appreciate it.
      - kenij 16y ago
        I have no links, but I can tell you what I heard from my grandfather. Basically, yes, they took guns to school. Everyone did. It wasn't considered abnormal at all. They never had any problems with school shootings either. I guess if everyone has a gun, you'd end up dead pretty fast if you tried to start anything. After school, they'd go hunting and try to shoot something for dinner that night. If they couldn't get anything, their family might go without dinner that night. I believe he lived in a fairly rural area though. I assume things were different in the cities.
deleted 16y ago
[deleted]
julius_geezer 16y ago
Plato! In his correspondence with Adams, they expend a great deal of abuse on Plato. Odd then, to find him commending the dialogues. Odd also to find such cold birds as Jefferson and Thoreau commending Anacreon. As for horses, face it, the Indians rode when it was convenient. It took the US a while to figure out that it was pointless to send infantry chasing after mounted tribes.
- tmsh 16y ago
  He does say Plato's Socratic dialogues. The Republic, which he has problems with (e.g., http://www.capitalismmagazine.com/culture/philosophy/5393-Jefferson-Plato.html http://www.capitalismmagazine.com/culture/philosophy/5393-Je... -- thanks for mentioning that correspondence -- had no idea, quite fascinating) we of course associate with the beginning of the end of Plato's Socratic dialogues -- even if he uses Socrates as a mouthpiece there and later. It's curious that Jefferson might've already understood those differences (he's also right about, e.g., 'Cicero's philosophies' as opposed to the guy's five billion other letters, speeches, commentaries, etc.). But then again Jefferson was sort of a baller (walk around and shoot things for exercise? I'm not a huge fan of guns or, frankly, Jefferson -- on account of his 400 slaves, etc. -- but if there was a baller in that century, it was probably him).
jamesseda 16y ago
I don't know who this guy thinks he is, but Learning French is waste of time.
- loewenskind 16y ago
  wtf? Learning another language is never a waste of time. If nothing else, it will help you learn your own language better.
  - pfedor 16y ago
    Learning another language requires so much time and effort that it is almost always an effort misplaced unless the language is English. Learning a language is a few years of hard work. I have a friend who is an assistant professor in Germany and he's toying with an idea of learning German, but he mentioned to me that he was wondering whether learning a programming language, say C++, wouldn't be a better use of his time. To which my answer was: By expanding the amount of effort required to learn to speak German, you wouldn't be able to just learn C++; the comparable thing would be to go from knowing nothing about programming, to knowing enough to be able to land a job as a Software Engineer in any company in the Silicon Valley.
    - loewenskind 16y ago
      What a useless point of view. English wont always be the dominant language. What will people like you do then? Is everything a waste of time unless you can directly make money from it? Learning a language teaches you so many things. Things about your language, gives you insight into other cultures, etc., etc.
      - pfedor 16y ago
        You have only this many five-years projects left to complete in this life. If you really prefer learning a foreign language to learning quantum mechanics, or computer programming, or how to play a piano, by all means don't let me stop you.
jberryman 16y ago
Give up money, give up fame, give up science, give the earth itself and all it contains, rather than do an immoral act. And never suppose, that in any possible situation, or under any circumstances, it is best for you to do a dishonorable thing, however slightly so it may appear to you. Whenever you are to do a thing, though it can never be known but to yourself, ask yourself how you would act were all the world looking at you, and act accordingly. Talk to me when you set free the 600 humans that you own. Until then you can fuck off to your castle on the hill and invent silly gadgets, and study plants while your farm loses money every year until your death.
- benihana 16y ago
  Talk to me when you don't apply current political and social ideals to pre-industrial revolution America 200 years ago.
  - jberryman 16y ago
    How about Jefferson's own ideals?
    - michael_dorfman 16y ago
      To me, the surprising fact isn't that the man who wrote "all men are created equal" owned slaves; the surprising thing is that a slave-owner wrote "all men are created equal." Talk about having ideals that transcend one's upbringing...
- lionhearted 16y ago
  http://lesswrong.com/lw/jb/applause_lights/ http://lesswrong.com/lw/jb/applause_lights/ It's possible to do nuanced analysis of that era, Jefferson's beliefs, his treatment of his slaves relative to other slaveowners, the fact that he freed them on his death, and the things he wrote about in his letters to contemporaries - if you read his letters, he constantly questioned slavery and had misgivings about it, but it was the norm for the era. You could make intelligent points about it. But you haven't done so. This "until then you can fuck off" is petty, it doesn't open anyone's mind - if you wanted to, you could put some thought into it and try to make a more nuanced, intelligent argument. Broadly condemning with profanity, no nuance, it doesn't change anyone's mind or enlighten anyone.

112 points by najirama 16y ago

It's amazing how much the wonders of technology and readily accessible information have screwed up the value many children in the past 3ish generations (my marker for the beginning of the decline is WWII reconstruction). A "renaissance man" now is a dilettante. In Jefferson's day it meant having both broad and deep knowledge. One could argue that the advances of science have made this impossible in modern times but I disagree. Regurgitating the fractured work of others isn't intelligence. Applying this information as a tool to advance oneself and the human good is the goal of education. Most children not only don't get this, they aren't even being taught the basic building blocks. I think this is the biggest incentive for the non-school movement, as well as the increase in other alternative [to governmental SOLs] programs. Those parents value an education for what it allows their children to contribute creatively, not just use the tools of others before them. I have exactly the same problem recruiting programmers. Like many large corporations we are primarily a Java & .Net shop and it is incredibly disappointing when 50% of the candidates can barely do more than drag controls out of the toolbox (<--- slight exaggeration, but not too much. I hire mostly in MX, BR, and IN and skilled folks are hard to come by. Ironically, this is usually because the cream are already working in the US/EU or earning US/EU pay in consulting gigs that are geography independent. Good for them.) My apologies for the rant, but this struck a nerve.

hsmyers 16y ago
The older we are the closer to the surface lies that nerve! Yours is not so much a rant as a much needed plea...
patio11 16y ago
"If you pay peanuts, you get monkeys."
- eitally 16y ago
  Agreed 100% (it's not my choice.)
  - patio11 16y ago
    You have my sympathy. (Two years managing an outsourcing operation in India working from specs Bablefished from Japanese. And being told by my Indians that my translations were wrong because Babelfish, Yahoo, and Google outvoted me. And having to justify to management why I was billing months of overtime to debugging in a project where a math error would be national news and where RC1 was delivered in a state where it was literally impossible to pass your test unless you were deaf...)
    - eitally 16y ago
      I'm not sure if my situation is better or worse. In our case they don't even bother trying to clarify specs. :-)
ryanwaggoner 16y ago
It's amazing how much the wonders of technology and readily accessible information have screwed up the value many children in the past 3ish generations Can you clarify the relationship of technology and readily accessible information to the downfall of societal values? I don't necessarily disagree with the conclusion, but I'm curious as to how you came up with that as a hypothesis for the cause.
- shantanubala 16y ago
  I don't speak for him, but here's my opinion. Since most information is just a quick web search away, most people have no incentive to actually absorb that information. Since we are constantly overloaded with information (and we're always connected to those sources of information -- email, IM, SMS, the news, etc.), we have to be extremely selective about the stuff we actually absorb. In the process, we lose absorption of the information that doesn't look good on the surface. For example, I was not very interested in physics until I started reading about Special and General Relativity. I wouldn't be able to understand those topics without learning boring and dry (in my opinion) Newtonian Mechanics first. In other words, we now usually only truly absorb stuff that looks good in the headline, rather than actually reading about it first. If we actually tried reading about all the stuff that's available, we'd be dead before we even got through a percent of it.
  - metamemetics 16y ago
    >Since most information is just a quick web search away, most people have no incentive to actually absorb that information. it's a moot point. In the 1700's we wouldn't have had access to the information anyway. Or even the money, time, and opportunities like aristocracy such as Jefferson had to buy books from London and study the smaller amount of knowledge available then. So rather than not having an incentive to absorb information X, we wouldn't have even known it existed! A large part of knowledge is knowing what you DON'T know. The truly dangerous individuals are idiots that think they know everything. Hopefully the web is making people realize that there are a lot of things out there they DON'T know. Decreasing anti-intelluctialism, provincialism, and narrow-mindedness. I would be ecstatic if more people got their news from the web than from television!
btilly 16y ago
A "renaissance man" now is a dilettante. In Jefferson's day it meant having both broad and deep knowledge. One could argue that the advances of science have made this impossible in modern times but I disagree. I believe you're being too fast to dismiss that argument. As is pointed out in http://www.its.caltech.edu/~dg/crunch_art.html http://www.its.caltech.edu/~dg/crunch_art.html, from Jefferson's day to relatively recently, the output in scientific journals increased 10-fold every 50 years. In Jefferson's day it was truly possible to learn what was known about all fields of science, and keep up with them all. Your knowledge could be broad and deep. But based on the sheer increase of volume, this soon became impossible. Today there are over 100,000 journals devoted to scientific research. Even if you read one page per second, every second, day and night, you would not even be scratching the surface of what is being produced. Regurgitating the fractured work of others isn't intelligence. Applying this information as a tool to advance oneself and the human good is the goal of education. Applying this information as a tool to advance oneself and the human good is the goal of education. This is a strong argument, but not necessarily for the point you are trying to make. Your argument leads to the point that we don't want students to just memorize random facts and regurgitate them. It does not lead to the point that it is possible to have both deep and broad knowledge about all fields. The challenge is that, thanks to the advances of science, today we both have more subjects to learn about (the "broad" is broader) and we know about them in more depth (the "deep" is deeper). This has made the ideal of having both broad and deep knowledge much, much harder. Hard enough that most conclude it is simply impossible.
- _delirium 16y ago
  I do think breadth and depth have expanded, but I think fundamentally less than the explosion in page count would suggest. There has also been a big decrease in signal-to-noise ratio, with a lot of crap published in journals, and not enough gardening work. IMO a much bigger proportion of scientific resources need to be put into survey articles, "recent advances in X" retrospectives, post-intro-level textbooks and tutorials, and even ideally some cross-field work, matching up equivalent/redundant ideas and harmonizing terminology. In academia at least, the incentives don't encourage that, though: even though a survey article is probably the single quickest way to have significant impact on a field (they're widely read, and you're forging the lens through which many subsequent people will view that field), they're not as well respected for advancement purposes as even very niche original research is. As it is, tons of stuff keeps getting reinvented just because the state of the literature is so bad that you'll never find it, unless it was invented exactly in your sub-sub-specialty, or you serendipitously found it via a colleague who remarked that what you were doing sounded similar to something he once read. The decline in scientists writing books also doesn't help. It used to be that prominent scientists would gather up their scattered papers and unify them into a magnum opus laying out their theories, or possibly a few different books, one on each major area they worked on. That sometimes happens, especially in areas like cosmology, but it's much less the norm than it was 100 years ago. Today it's quite common to just publish 200+ papers over your career and not really do any summarization of them, even though there is plenty that could often be done, since it's common for papers to supersede or overlap with previous ones. Actually, on that front, it'd be a big win if scientists with lots of publications simply provided some sort of brief guide to them. Take the 50 papers on lasers, and provide an annotated bibliography explaining which papers are the important ones, which papers are obsolete or superseded, and which ones might be of particular interest to people working on particular topics. A few people do that, but many don't even separate their list of publications by topic, let alone provide a guide. Or, shorter: There is a lot of stuff published, but it's terribly indexed and summarized, which I think is a bigger problem than the volume alone.
mmodahl 16y ago
"Fortunately, literacy, though it consumes its own oral antecedants and, unless it is carefully monitored, even destroys their memory, is also infinitely adaptable. It can restore their memory, too." Ong, Walter J.. Orality and Literacy. New York: Routledge, 2003: 15. We need not limit our knowledge and view of the world to what fits in our brain. We do, however, need to make sure that what we are putting into our brain is useful to ourselves and to humanity; Up-Up-Down-Down-Left-Right-Left-Right-B-A-Start.
- Gormo 16y ago
  If only that could give us 30x the retention and depth of understanding.
metamemetics 16y ago
>"renaissance man" now is a dilettante. In Jefferson's day it meant having both broad and deep knowledge. Jefferson's estimated net worth is $212 million. George Washington's is $525 million. It seems like you are comparing the values of a notably intelligent and published subset of the upper 1% aristocratic crust subset of society to the general population today. Hardly a fair comparison. You are railing against people for being dumb and yet have really bad proposals as to the cause. "It's the schools fault, let's do away with schools" "It's the kids' VALUES" You fail to consider that: 1. Intelligence is a distribution. There have always been dumb people and there always will be. 2. Economics. Blacks used to score significantly lower on IQ tests than whites in America. But guess what, the gap was directly proportional to the gap in poverty rate (http://www.huppi.com/kangaroo/L-IQgapgenetic.htm http://www.huppi.com/kangaroo/L-IQgapgenetic.htm). As the economic status of blacks in America improved the gap has decreased. If you want to compare the intelligence of groups of people large enough to account for outliers, the difference is always largely socioeconomic. Thus I will argue the OPPOSITE of your hypothesis is true: The wonders of technology and readily accessible information are the most important factor driving down global poverty, resulting in a higher percentage of the global population fulfilling a "Jeffersonian" ideal of the renaissance man with deep knowledge, whereas it was the time and opportunities and books to achieve that level of study was before confined to the aristocracy.
- eitally 16y ago
  1. Intelligence is a distribution -- I don't disagree, but I also believe 99% of the population never realizes their potential, and in a lot of cases the educational system is the cause. 2. Yes, technology is driving down global poverty, but in the already privileged world I don't think this holds true. Where people want to learn they will find ways to do so. Where they are apathetic, they will find ways to remain ignorant.
kiba 16y ago
>>I think this is the biggest incentive for the non-school movement, as well as the increase in other alternative [to governmental SOLs] programs. Those parents value an education for what it allows their children to contribute creatively, not just use the tools of others before them. Apparently, you missed makerzine, maker faire, 3D printers, harry potter fanfiction, and hackaday. You also did not get the memo that people are actually becoming smarter over time. It's the Flynn's Effect. If you're going to whine about how the good old day are better, maybe you should show us some real evidence why this is actually so.
- eitally 16y ago
  No, I didn't miss those things, nor have I missed other great stuff like the Khan Academy or MIT's OCW. My beef is with structured education -- especially in the US -- and the fact that the immediate gratification provided by technology hinders more than helps many children.
wazoox 16y ago
> A "renaissance man" now is a dilettante. I'm a proud dilettante. Heck, I've read all the books Jefferson mentioned :)

slay2k 16y ago

Awesome read, though Jefferson seems to have suffered from the "these are facts because I said so" type of thinking. Here are some relevant quotes: "Sitting up late at night is injurious to the health, and not useful to the mind." "Games played with the ball, and others of that nature, are too violent for the body, and stamp no character on the mind." "As to the species of exercise, I advise the gun. [snip] Let your gun therefore be the constant companion of your walks. [snip] Walking is the best possible exercise." That last one leaves me pondering what he's talking about, since he doesn't appear to be referring to hunting, unless it's the long-relaxing-walks-while-hunting kind.. Aside from that, I'm curious how much of the reading list will be doable these days without a solid grasp of Greek or Latin or French ? I kind of wanna give it a shot.

forensic 16y ago
>long-relaxing-walks-while-hunting kind yep. bird hunting i think.
- simonsarris 16y ago
  Yeah this used to be pretty common, especially for schoolchildren for at least 100 years after Jefferson's time to "walk" home while hunting.
  - slay2k 16y ago
    Crazy. To what end, food on the table ? This would also imply the children took guns to school. Am I the only one who finds this rather insane ? Also, if you happen to have any links on the matter I'd appreciate it.
    - kenij 16y ago
      I have no links, but I can tell you what I heard from my grandfather. Basically, yes, they took guns to school. Everyone did. It wasn't considered abnormal at all. They never had any problems with school shootings either. I guess if everyone has a gun, you'd end up dead pretty fast if you tried to start anything. After school, they'd go hunting and try to shoot something for dinner that night. If they couldn't get anything, their family might go without dinner that night. I believe he lived in a fairly rural area though. I assume things were different in the cities.

deleted 16y ago

[deleted]

julius_geezer 16y ago

Plato! In his correspondence with Adams, they expend a great deal of abuse on Plato. Odd then, to find him commending the dialogues. Odd also to find such cold birds as Jefferson and Thoreau commending Anacreon. As for horses, face it, the Indians rode when it was convenient. It took the US a while to figure out that it was pointless to send infantry chasing after mounted tribes.

tmsh 16y ago
He does say Plato's Socratic dialogues. The Republic, which he has problems with (e.g., http://www.capitalismmagazine.com/culture/philosophy/5393-Jefferson-Plato.html http://www.capitalismmagazine.com/culture/philosophy/5393-Je... -- thanks for mentioning that correspondence -- had no idea, quite fascinating) we of course associate with the beginning of the end of Plato's Socratic dialogues -- even if he uses Socrates as a mouthpiece there and later. It's curious that Jefferson might've already understood those differences (he's also right about, e.g., 'Cicero's philosophies' as opposed to the guy's five billion other letters, speeches, commentaries, etc.). But then again Jefferson was sort of a baller (walk around and shoot things for exercise? I'm not a huge fan of guns or, frankly, Jefferson -- on account of his 400 slaves, etc. -- but if there was a baller in that century, it was probably him).

jamesseda 16y ago

I don't know who this guy thinks he is, but Learning French is waste of time.

loewenskind 16y ago
wtf? Learning another language is never a waste of time. If nothing else, it will help you learn your own language better.
- pfedor 16y ago
  Learning another language requires so much time and effort that it is almost always an effort misplaced unless the language is English. Learning a language is a few years of hard work. I have a friend who is an assistant professor in Germany and he's toying with an idea of learning German, but he mentioned to me that he was wondering whether learning a programming language, say C++, wouldn't be a better use of his time. To which my answer was: By expanding the amount of effort required to learn to speak German, you wouldn't be able to just learn C++; the comparable thing would be to go from knowing nothing about programming, to knowing enough to be able to land a job as a Software Engineer in any company in the Silicon Valley.
  - loewenskind 16y ago
    What a useless point of view. English wont always be the dominant language. What will people like you do then? Is everything a waste of time unless you can directly make money from it? Learning a language teaches you so many things. Things about your language, gives you insight into other cultures, etc., etc.
    - pfedor 16y ago
      You have only this many five-years projects left to complete in this life. If you really prefer learning a foreign language to learning quantum mechanics, or computer programming, or how to play a piano, by all means don't let me stop you.

jberryman 16y ago

Give up money, give up fame, give up science, give the earth itself and all it contains, rather than do an immoral act. And never suppose, that in any possible situation, or under any circumstances, it is best for you to do a dishonorable thing, however slightly so it may appear to you. Whenever you are to do a thing, though it can never be known but to yourself, ask yourself how you would act were all the world looking at you, and act accordingly. Talk to me when you set free the 600 humans that you own. Until then you can fuck off to your castle on the hill and invent silly gadgets, and study plants while your farm loses money every year until your death.

benihana 16y ago
Talk to me when you don't apply current political and social ideals to pre-industrial revolution America 200 years ago.
- jberryman 16y ago
  How about Jefferson's own ideals?
  - michael_dorfman 16y ago
    To me, the surprising fact isn't that the man who wrote "all men are created equal" owned slaves; the surprising thing is that a slave-owner wrote "all men are created equal." Talk about having ideals that transcend one's upbringing...
lionhearted 16y ago
http://lesswrong.com/lw/jb/applause_lights/ http://lesswrong.com/lw/jb/applause_lights/ It's possible to do nuanced analysis of that era, Jefferson's beliefs, his treatment of his slaves relative to other slaveowners, the fact that he freed them on his death, and the things he wrote about in his letters to contemporaries - if you read his letters, he constantly questioned slavery and had misgivings about it, but it was the norm for the era. You could make intelligent points about it. But you haven't done so. This "until then you can fuck off" is petty, it doesn't open anyone's mind - if you wanted to, you could put some thought into it and try to make a more nuanced, intelligent argument. Broadly condemning with profanity, no nuance, it doesn't change anyone's mind or enlighten anyone.