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And people say studying humanities is useless... Before you can even begin to approach questions like this, you have to get a lay of the land at least... read

And people say studying humanities is useless... Before you can even begin to approach questions like this, you have to get a lay of the land at least... read an article on philosophy and religion in the encyclopedia. These aren't new questions. They've been dissected and applied to the furthest reaches of our understanding. It's all written down and at our fingertips 24/7. They underlie the primary question in the article. Retirement is irrelevant. In a very roundabout way it seems like that is what Mr Greenspun is trying to say, but it kind of comes across as (the illustrious Gordon Lightfoot put it) a "rich man's spiritual". > In olden times, the average person didn't expect to be happy. How can this even be proposed? Maybe I just read way too into this. Is it a joke? edit: I don't like leaving such negative comments. I envy Mr Greenspun. I'm not 37 yet but I'm not too far off, either. If I could retire at that age and spend the rest of my life exploring philosophy and leisure... well I could hardly think of a finer place to end up in one's life. Starting to ask the questions at all is how to start. Kudos.

nafizh 5y ago
You can read all the philosophy in the world. It doesn't automatically turn into actionable realities. Also, any philosophy is subjective, you are a human, you said something, I am a human, I beg to differ and so on and on....
- 52-6F-62 5y ago
  Absolutely you can read it to death and still glean nothing from it. I don't know how many times I've had to reread, and I usually continue to do so. And to that end it takes more than just reading it, but if one wants to ask some profound questions about the world around oneself now that one doesn't have someone breathing down one's neck then one should probably start where others left off. It'll save a little time. The point where you took a wrong turn was assuming that philosophy is all based on hearsay. There's been a lot of effort to ground pretty fundamental ideas to what we understand about reality, to the extent that we understand it. It's worth working to grasp some of that. It helps. If you like quantizations and mathematical/logical formality that exists as well, but mind that you'll probably want to do a lot of comparative reading. To put this in programmer's terms: why would you re-implement libc when you haven't even looked at the existing source code or surrounding arguments? That would look like a fool's errand: not because the effort isn't worthwhile, but because you could save yourself a lot of time and use the lessons of the past to inform your next efforts rather than blindly making all of the same mistakes or rediscovering what was already known (to our best efforts). Worse, you might end up wandering around ranting about how someone should implement a core supportive library for a common systems language without ever looking to find out if there is one in the first place.
  - hnfong 5y ago
    The counter argument is that "philosophers" could be dead wrong. Imagine the range of different philosophies that existed in various times and places. Popular interpretations of philosophical texts could be wrong (referring to your suggestion of reading an encyclopedia). You might not even understand the "right" question in the first place. My personal experience is that giving the problem space a bit of thought and coming to preliminary conclusions before comparing with what mainstream thought has to say makes the whole ordeal more fun and possibly lets you learn the finer nuances and different perspectives more. PS: the analogy with libc is quite interesting after thinking about it for a bit actually. If you just want to use a C library, you don't reimplement it. But if you want to learn about C or libc specifically, re-implementing libc from the specs is probably the best way to do it.
    - 52-6F-62 5y ago
      I think I would recommend reading about some of those philosophies you consider "dead wrong" and how they came to be. Once you start to understand how they were formed in the first place, I think you would be less ready to deride them. In fact, I'll bet you it entices you because you'll end up catching yourself saying "hey, I thought of that". But what you'll find is that that one notion you may have figured out on your own is itself a nuance of a larger system of understandings. That you'll find a lot more work has been done than you realized to understand and prove each of those notions to the best of our collective knowledge. Then you'll understand why grabbing a single notion and anchoring to it like the author is doing is so fundamentally flawed that it's not a positive exercise. To use the "rich man's spiritual" reference again: the "rich man" of the poem is basing his salvation on the idea that he has to have enough of whatever new thing he decides is between him and heaven/salvation/happiness before he can ever attain it. The "rich man" put that barrier there, himself. He created the frame for his experience and bound himself to it by creating it in the first place. In the poem, the central character is making the declaration that he needs more to defend his existing material accumulations, so it's not exactly a 1:1. But that kind of self-imposed framework based on nothing grounded can be self-limiting. It can make it hard to understand real fundamentals.
jt2190 5y ago
> How can [the idea that in the past that the average person did not expect to be happy] even be proposed? Maybe I just read way too into this. Is it a joke? First off, the author continued: > Life could be a struggle for survival with hard work and adversity at every corner. Marriages were arranged by parents and if, after 20 years, the couple hated each other, there was no option to divorce. While I guess that particular life experience is not necessarily incompatible with happiness (“I love my life as a sustenance farmer!”) it was definitely, by modern standards, very hard, and not at all what most people strive for in their retirement.
- 52-6F-62 5y ago
  The author is making a lot of assumptions about fundamental matters of philosophy and human psychology. For instance, before we escape the first phrase in the section you quoted the author assumed that hard work and adversity run contradictory to happiness—or even actively oppose it. I left the Gordon Lightfoot reference for a reason: the pleading of people for more material resources as the only road to their personal salvation from misery is there in psalm as a "rich man's spiritual". "If I only had more X I could find my happiness/peace/salvation". In this article Mr Greenspun appears to begin to make a departure from that notion, but seems to keep tripping over strongly-held beliefs justifying a lust for financial rewards. That's not an easy thing to get away from. Hell, there are tomes upon tomes about that very struggle—confusing the idea that you may as well enjoy the material to your capacity (he references Camus in that manner) with the material enjoyment being a prerequisite for your happiness.
  - mvp 5y ago
    It is unavoidable for the kind of article the author is writing. He is trying to give the perspective of a person who has 'been there'. This I imagine is very interesting to read for people who want to 'be there' or going to. For them, an article that doesn't deal too deeply into philosophy may be more appealing. This is possible only if the author makes a lot of assumptions. And of course, if you don't agree with those assumptions, you'll just move on.
    - 5y ago

nafizh 5y ago

You can read all the philosophy in the world. It doesn't automatically turn into actionable realities. Also, any philosophy is subjective, you are a human, you said something, I am a human, I beg to differ and so on and on....

52-6F-62 5y ago
Absolutely you can read it to death and still glean nothing from it. I don't know how many times I've had to reread, and I usually continue to do so. And to that end it takes more than just reading it, but if one wants to ask some profound questions about the world around oneself now that one doesn't have someone breathing down one's neck then one should probably start where others left off. It'll save a little time. The point where you took a wrong turn was assuming that philosophy is all based on hearsay. There's been a lot of effort to ground pretty fundamental ideas to what we understand about reality, to the extent that we understand it. It's worth working to grasp some of that. It helps. If you like quantizations and mathematical/logical formality that exists as well, but mind that you'll probably want to do a lot of comparative reading. To put this in programmer's terms: why would you re-implement libc when you haven't even looked at the existing source code or surrounding arguments? That would look like a fool's errand: not because the effort isn't worthwhile, but because you could save yourself a lot of time and use the lessons of the past to inform your next efforts rather than blindly making all of the same mistakes or rediscovering what was already known (to our best efforts). Worse, you might end up wandering around ranting about how someone should implement a core supportive library for a common systems language without ever looking to find out if there is one in the first place.
- hnfong 5y ago
  The counter argument is that "philosophers" could be dead wrong. Imagine the range of different philosophies that existed in various times and places. Popular interpretations of philosophical texts could be wrong (referring to your suggestion of reading an encyclopedia). You might not even understand the "right" question in the first place. My personal experience is that giving the problem space a bit of thought and coming to preliminary conclusions before comparing with what mainstream thought has to say makes the whole ordeal more fun and possibly lets you learn the finer nuances and different perspectives more. PS: the analogy with libc is quite interesting after thinking about it for a bit actually. If you just want to use a C library, you don't reimplement it. But if you want to learn about C or libc specifically, re-implementing libc from the specs is probably the best way to do it.
  - 52-6F-62 5y ago
    I think I would recommend reading about some of those philosophies you consider "dead wrong" and how they came to be. Once you start to understand how they were formed in the first place, I think you would be less ready to deride them. In fact, I'll bet you it entices you because you'll end up catching yourself saying "hey, I thought of that". But what you'll find is that that one notion you may have figured out on your own is itself a nuance of a larger system of understandings. That you'll find a lot more work has been done than you realized to understand and prove each of those notions to the best of our collective knowledge. Then you'll understand why grabbing a single notion and anchoring to it like the author is doing is so fundamentally flawed that it's not a positive exercise. To use the "rich man's spiritual" reference again: the "rich man" of the poem is basing his salvation on the idea that he has to have enough of whatever new thing he decides is between him and heaven/salvation/happiness before he can ever attain it. The "rich man" put that barrier there, himself. He created the frame for his experience and bound himself to it by creating it in the first place. In the poem, the central character is making the declaration that he needs more to defend his existing material accumulations, so it's not exactly a 1:1. But that kind of self-imposed framework based on nothing grounded can be self-limiting. It can make it hard to understand real fundamentals.

jt2190 5y ago

> How can [the idea that in the past that the average person did not expect to be happy] even be proposed? Maybe I just read way too into this. Is it a joke? First off, the author continued: > Life could be a struggle for survival with hard work and adversity at every corner. Marriages were arranged by parents and if, after 20 years, the couple hated each other, there was no option to divorce. While I guess that particular life experience is not necessarily incompatible with happiness (“I love my life as a sustenance farmer!”) it was definitely, by modern standards, very hard, and not at all what most people strive for in their retirement.

52-6F-62 5y ago
The author is making a lot of assumptions about fundamental matters of philosophy and human psychology. For instance, before we escape the first phrase in the section you quoted the author assumed that hard work and adversity run contradictory to happiness—or even actively oppose it. I left the Gordon Lightfoot reference for a reason: the pleading of people for more material resources as the only road to their personal salvation from misery is there in psalm as a "rich man's spiritual". "If I only had more X I could find my happiness/peace/salvation". In this article Mr Greenspun appears to begin to make a departure from that notion, but seems to keep tripping over strongly-held beliefs justifying a lust for financial rewards. That's not an easy thing to get away from. Hell, there are tomes upon tomes about that very struggle—confusing the idea that you may as well enjoy the material to your capacity (he references Camus in that manner) with the material enjoyment being a prerequisite for your happiness.
- mvp 5y ago
  It is unavoidable for the kind of article the author is writing. He is trying to give the perspective of a person who has 'been there'. This I imagine is very interesting to read for people who want to 'be there' or going to. For them, an article that doesn't deal too deeply into philosophy may be more appealing. This is possible only if the author makes a lot of assumptions. And of course, if you don't agree with those assumptions, you'll just move on.
  - 5y ago