4 ms·
You are mistaken in concluding that "normal" people shape a city. The traits that make a city unique are the result of the actions of a minority of its inhabita
by mroman 18y ago
You are mistaken in concluding that "normal" people shape a city. The traits that make a city unique are the result of the actions of a minority of its inhabitants.
If your "logic" were accurate, Los Angeles would be no different than Tijuana, for example, considering that most of the "normal" people there are lower class Mexican immigrants.
Allow me to inform you of something essential about PG's essays: they require intelligence to truly understand, to the point that his core arguments will simply sail over the heads of those who lack it.
Evidence of not having the required intelligence includes attempting to refute the core arguments with a myriad of minor points that appear to point out logical flaws, when they only manage to address comparatively minor items of negligible consequence.
Mr. Graham's essays are valuable owing to their QUALITATIVE aspects, not to their total QUANTITATIVE sum . . .
- maxklein 18y agoI'm not the cleverest guy in this room. I once took an online IQ test and only got 115. To be fair, lots of questions were things like "What of this has no relationship with Kansas". But I digress... If a person trying to communicate cannot make his point understood by any but the most intelligent, then he has failed in communicating.
- earthboundkid 18y agoIt depends on the point and the audience. If the point is complex enough, then you have to give up on conveying it to certain people. If the audience is smart enough, you reach past the lowest common denominator. Indeed, the best way to write something that lasts for ages is to write something that ordinary people reject, bright people don't really understand, and the smart fall head over heels in love with. That's what keeps Plato in business. No one knows what he was saying exactly, but the really smart guys running the universe can't help but be charmed by it.
- comatose_kid 18y agoI wonder if 'the point is complex enough, then you have to give up on conveying it to certain people' is true. That Feynman could explain fairly abstract physical concepts such that laypeople could understand them may imply that one needs to understand the 'complex point' better before trying to explain it.
- earthboundkid 18y agoWittgenstein started one public lecture with a disclaimer to the effect, "This will not be one of those popular science lectures where you come out of the talk thinking you understand a topic that you understand nothing about." With all due respect to Feynman, if at the end of his lectures lay people couldn't do the math behind the physics he described, they didn't really "understand" it. They understood a simplified picture of it that captured most of the important details in a really vivid way. But they were still missing something important. That said, you're right. In the general case, we shouldn't allow ourselves the "out" of "oh, this is soooo complex that I can't speak clearly" without some pretty damn strong motivation. It's just that in this particular case, I didn't think the essay was especially jargon laden, so the OP's comment seemed misplaced. How much more simply can one explain that cities affect how you think?
- mroman 18y agoOoooohh - cute downmodding . . . I think this is the last time I post to this board, the modding fascism is MUCH too High School for me.