4 ms·

> I think Marvin Minsky was the first person that I saw take a stand against "knowing yourself" Ordinarily M. de Villefort made and returned very few visits.

by tolciho 7mo ago

> I think Marvin Minsky was the first person that I saw take a stand against "knowing yourself" Ordinarily M. de Villefort made and returned very few visits. His wife visited for him, and this was the received thing in the world, where the weighty and multifarious occupations of the magistrate were accepted as an excuse for what was really only calculated pride, a manifestation of professed superiority—in fact, the application of the axiom, _Pretend to think well of yourself, and the world will think well of you_, an axiom a hundred times more useful in society nowadays than that of the Greeks, “Know thyself,” a knowledge for which, in our days, we have substituted the less difficult and more advantageous science of _knowing others_. "The Count of Monte Cristo". Alexandre Dumas. 1846.

tolciho 7mo ago
And, spoiler alert, Villefort is nouveau riche, Mammon-oriented, and has pretensions of philosophy. Where have I seen that before? He is also the villain of the story.
curio_Pol_curio 7mo ago
Did Dumas explore the liminal space between "know thyself" and "know others", also known as "know one another"? Did Villefort's wife or "The Count"'s romantic interests help them patch up their blind spots? One can ofc argue that mutual learning has been the death of many a marriage/family, but I'm more interested in how self-reliance taken to its "rational-agentic-alignment" extreme is a primary obstacle to self-improvement :) That's a framing Minsky didn't take in his Society of Mind.. but I'm not obviously looking forward to a hallucinated sequel Mind of Society
- curio_Pol_curio 7mo ago
  Update: missed this relevant comment! In the sense of examining both Minsky's or GP's (viz ours) frames. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47603333 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47603333 >"It's difficult to _[think]?/[will]?_ what we feel is wrong" But it's easier for a third party (wife/therapist/LLM) to point out framing errors? As we are collectively doing to Andreessen's and Villefort's in this thread:)

by tolciho 7mo ago

tolciho 7mo ago

And, spoiler alert, Villefort is nouveau riche, Mammon-oriented, and has pretensions of philosophy. Where have I seen that before? He is also the villain of the story.

curio_Pol_curio 7mo ago

Did Dumas explore the liminal space between "know thyself" and "know others", also known as "know one another"? Did Villefort's wife or "The Count"'s romantic interests help them patch up their blind spots? One can ofc argue that mutual learning has been the death of many a marriage/family, but I'm more interested in how self-reliance taken to its "rational-agentic-alignment" extreme is a primary obstacle to self-improvement :) That's a framing Minsky didn't take in his Society of Mind.. but I'm not obviously looking forward to a hallucinated sequel Mind of Society

curio_Pol_curio 7mo ago
Update: missed this relevant comment! In the sense of examining both Minsky's or GP's (viz ours) frames. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47603333 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47603333 >"It's difficult to _[think]?/[will]?_ what we feel is wrong" But it's easier for a third party (wife/therapist/LLM) to point out framing errors? As we are collectively doing to Andreessen's and Villefort's in this thread:)