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Schopenhauer - On thinking for oneself
- mark_l_watson 17y agoI find that some good books take a very long time for me to read because I need to stop and mull over what I am reading. Case in point: I just finished a short Joseph Campbell book ("Pathways to Bliss"): I would literally stop every paragraph or two and reflect on how the material was relevant to my own life, about my own 'myth,' etc. It took me a month to work through this short book.
- pmichaud 17y agoI JUST wrote a draft of an essay that says essentially what this says: Writing is necessary to thinking, and reading doesn't cut it.
- mark_l_watson 17y agoYou are right about writing: it shows you what you don't yet thoroughly understand and need to think about some more.
- jacquesm 17y agoWriting changes the writer more than reading changes the reader.
- erikb85 17y agoIs writing and thinking identical to U?
- mbrubeck 17y agoLucky for you that you read Schopenhauer's version. Now you won't need to finish writing your own. :)
- araneae 17y agoSo... you've never composed an essay in your head without writing it down? Writing may help you organize your thoughts, but it's not necessary.
- ugh 17y agoJust composing in the head is a nice first step, but merely thinking about something makes it easy to gloss over flaws in your thinking that you have to face when wrting something down (if you do non-stream-of-consciousness writing). On the other hand you have to think about things only tangentially related to the actual problem you are writing about like style, grammer and finding the right words. So there are advantages and disadvantages to actually writing stuff down.
- mbrubeck 17y agoHow many bugs do you find before writing the code, compared to the number you find after?
- araneae 17y agoAre you saying you don't learn anything from thinking through how to write a big piece of code before you write it? The vast majority of bugs I find after writing the code are trivial. Certainly, I learn something from writing it, but I find that if I just start writing without thinking about it first, especially for larger projects, I don't end up where I want to and have to scrap large pieces of it. Writing helps you get the details straight, but thinking is essential for designing the big picture.
- pmichaud 17y agoI just posted the essay: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=993253 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=993253
- erikb85 17y agoOnce a person told me: "When will people realise that reading is consumption, too? It is like watching TV. U just should not do it." I never forget that. Interesting to see, that other people think the same way.
- lovskogen 17y agoA real kicker for getting my head out of Google Reader.
- dpatru 17y agoThis is a old argument for the modern practice of blogging. I've often been confused as to the relative merits of reading versus writing. In reading, you gain a lot of information quickly. In writing, you develop your own thinking. Schopenhauer makes it clear that not only is writing vastly superior, but that reading is potentially bad for you, because it encourages replacing active (strenuous) thought with lazy listening. Paul Graham's advice to "run uphill" is a generalization of this: the better activities require more effort.
- lolcraft 17y agoMost of the time, there's little thought involved in blogging. Writing does not guarantee the writer has something to say: for sure I'm not the only one to have read vacuous blogs the Internet would be better without (I'm thinking of most twitters).
- yters 17y agoGlad I read his argument then.
- jodrellblank 17y agoWhat a load of very repetetive smug unjustified claims. """That is why all those who think for themselves come, at bottom, to much the same conclusion""" ! (Edit: It does change after a while. Press on past the chain of: People who think are superior to people who read. People who think are superior to people who read. People who think (e.g. me) are superior to people who read. People who think (e.g. me) are superior to most people. I am superior to most people. I am superior to most people).
- yummyfajitas 17y agoTo be fair, this is (eventually) true of any factual claim: all rational Bayesians must agree given sufficient information, regardless of what their priors were. But you are right, this fact is more often invoked to justify smug in-group monocultures.
- jodrellblank 17y agoI just popped back to delete my comment, but since it has a reply now I will leave it and ask another question I've been wondering about your Bayesian remark: Does that mean all Bayesian's are trying to be the same as each other? That Bayesianism considers human individuality silly? Because if all Bayesians must agree given sufficient information, then the only things left to disagree on (potentially) are ideas which have no fixed grounding in reality, such as whether Wilkie Wilkinson's writings show colonial alienation - and maybe they would eventually agree if given enough information on each other's mental states and histories. So, is it pushing towards the idea that there is only one possible rational superintelligent view?
- GavinB 17y agoGiven enough information, rational thinkers should come to the conclusions about matters of fact. Bayes says nothing about goals, however. Rational Bayesians can have completely divergent goals, so becoming increasingly rational does not impinge on "human individuality."
- pchickey 17y agoIf you enjoy this, Transcendent Speculation on the Apparent Deliberateness in the Fate of the Individual is another great essay by "the passionate and lucid Schopenhauer" : http://books.google.com/books?id=aXFsb2UogOkC&pg=PA199&lpg=PA199&dq=on+the+apparent+deliberateness+in+the+fate+of+the+individual&source=bl&ots=vFj0uJY9Pd&sig=qFaoNtwN7KV3i9TA9JePIZvGgYQ&hl=en&ei=P9GhSpGYGdud8QakpuC7Bg&sa=X&oi=book_result&ct=result&resnum=1#v=onepage&q=&f=true http://books.google.com/books?id=aXFsb2UogOkC&pg=PA199&#...
- anr 17y agoHe also wrote this essay: On Reading and Books - http://ebooks.adelaide.edu.au/s/schopenhauer/arthur/essays/chapter5.html http://ebooks.adelaide.edu.au/s/schopenhauer/arthur/essays/c... in which he talks about "[those that] have read themselves stupid." It's interesting that we can trace a parallel with technology: reading too much but building too little.
- pavs 17y agoBookmarked. Will read it later. I have already read too much for today.
- wolfish 17y agoI've never read a book that didn't make me think for myself.
- by 17y agoTransposed to programming I'll take this as saying "Don't use other people's libraries, write your own, because you will understand them properly and they will integrate better with your programs."
- araneae 17y ago"And it will make you much less productive because you'll be spending all your time redoing something someone's already done, probably better than you ever could." I mean, with that logic, you might as well write in assembly.
- george_morgan 17y agoSchopenhauer also wrote some cracking stuff on women: http://www.heretical.com/miscella/onwomen.html http://www.heretical.com/miscella/onwomen.html
- omouse 17y agoI wonder how much of those ideas are merely a reflection of the society he lived in rather than his own thoughts?
- tdoggette 17y agoThat's an excuse I'd accept for someone's everyday views: "eh, they probably never thought about it and just went with society's default." When a philosopher sits down and writes about their perspective on a topic, it's a safe assumption that they thought about their conclusions before publishing them.
- omouse 17y agoI'm not sure that's a safe assumption. It seems to me that everyone has a weak spot even if they think they're thinking about it thoroughly. We're only human after all.
- christopherolah 17y agoI just read the Wikipedia entry for his views on woman. There's an interesting part at the end: After the elderly Schopenhauer sat for a sculpture portrait by Elisabet Ney, he told Richard Wagner's friend Malwida von Meysenbug, "I have not yet spoken my last word about women. I believe that if a woman succeeds in withdrawing from the mass, or rather raising herself above the mass, she grows ceaselessly and more than a man." He might be a misogynist, but at least he recognised exceptions. It's also interesting (in the context of his time) to note that he was a strong supporter of abolitionism and animal rights.
- araneae 17y agoReading is nothing more than a substitute for thought of one’s own. It means putting the mind into leading-strings. Newton couldn't have invented classical mechanics without the ancient Greeks. In order to think, you need something to think about; you need input. Some of that input will be from watching apples fall off of trees. Some of it will be from information gathered from other people, presented in books. What rubbish.
- mortehu 17y agoI think you missed this part: "The really scientific thinker does the same thing as these illiterate persons, but on a larger scale. Although he has need of much knowledge, and so must read a great deal [...]"