6 ms·
Literature is notably absent...
by hmgibson23 12y ago
Literature is notably absent...
- deleted 12y ago[deleted]
- cwbrandsma 12y agoI knew there was something I liked about this list. (aren't there enough of those already?)
- hmgibson23 12y agoNo. I just think it's odd he hasn't included it that's all.
- pokpokpok 12y agoit is odd, but I chalk it up to the fact that bret is a young man who's poured his productivity into a field that's fairly broad already. can't fault him for not being as well read in other areas so far in his life, but i'm sure he's interested in getting around to enjoying literature some day
- treme 12y agoyou make much assumptions about how well read Bret is in other areas.
- harimau 12y agoI don't find it so odd. If you read more than a few interviews with professional writers of literature, you'll see them mention how they don't read much fiction but a lot of non-fiction.
- drcode 12y agoYeah, for some reason it is culturally unacceptable in our society to claim that fiction literature is unimportant. We live in a society where it's fine to make shocking arguments about just about anything, but if anyone were to dare argue "What Dostoyevsky and Shakespeare had to say is pretty irrelevant and uninteresting at this point" they are a social pariah.
- williamcotton 12y agoYou've touched on something incredibly deep here. Fact and fiction are one and the same in storytelling, that is, in the conveying of ideas from one person to another. A mathematical system of symbolic logic is just a strange loop. It is a fiction. It is rooted in nature, in the world that we observe, but so is a poem. There's been a trend since the Enlightenment to split the world in to RATIONAL SCIENCE and OTHER THINGS. The goal was mainly to finally remove all of the religious mumbo-jumbo and superstition from the realms of science. In the process however, we ignored our qualities of perception and language. Not only is the majority of what is important and true in our lives expressed through words and feelings but it also colors every aspect of mathematics and science. It basically took those fields eating their own tails to realize the ultimate folly of their philosophical pursuits. Thoughts like these are often misinterpreted as attacks on reason and rationality. They are merely illustrations of the limitation of pure reason, a topic that has been broached by the great thinkers time and again. The lessons never seem to sit. Language and metaphor are constantly shifting yet our written records are set in stone, destined for misinterpretation. But life without folly, without mystery, what life is that?
- anaphor 12y agoI used to read a lot more fiction before I got into computer science. I still have a fairly large library of fantasy novels and other fiction. I would like to get back into reading that sort of thing, but it seems like I never have the massive amount of time it takes to get into stuff like that now that I spend a lot of time reading technical literature as well. Any ideas? Edit: I also find a lot of technical/programmer/etc... types don't really know much about film, which is really an amazing art form if you look beyond the typical hollywood stuff (e.g. Kurosawa, Herzog, Tarkovsky, etc...)
- hmgibson23 12y agoBut by the same token is it not culturally unacceptable to say that science is irrelevant?
- ececconi 12y agoUnless you consider Watchmen literature