Arnold Kling: Should we approach famous thinkers by digesting distilled versions, or should we study them in the original? … Many great thinkers had some terrible ideas … Many … notoriously lacked clarity. … Much of what I do consists of attempts to contribute to the distillation process.
I would distinguish between subject matter literacy and canonical text literacy for scientific fields.
It's the difference between being able to score above the 90th% on the GRE biology and having read a bunch of classicbooks like "The Origin of Species".
I'm as credentialist-prone as you, but reading many old, classic, texts in a field strikes me as one of the weaker credential signals for an active, evolving field of science.
So what? Unless you are in the history department you are theoretically trying to advance the understanding of economics/philosophy/whatever not discern what in particular some old dead guy felt about the subject.
Who cares if you end up thinking Smith had a different view than he did. He won't mind but the world will if that interferes with you learning more actual economics.
If that's what you mean than stop misleading people about it. Admit you just like the aesthetic/spiritual feelings it induces in you and want to do it for pleasure even though it retards the understanding of economics/philosophy/whatever by waisting time.
Then we could treat it just like going on a walk in nature and those of us who don't feel the appeal wouldn't be sneered at or pushed into it on the grounds of it beeing a good way to learn.
If you would gain nothing from a distillation that Plato is merely producing literature not valid intellectual insights about what's true.
I mean evidently you can recognize that Plato has these vital philosophical insights so what could possibly stop you from passing them on? Did he just stumble upon the best possible exposition and unlike any other originator of an idea never got confused....or did he just get lucky and get confused in exactly the right places to help later people understand more?
On what theory could Plato have had this amazing power that all his predecessors lacked? Do you really think he was that much smarter than everyone who has come since?
----
It's amazing how many people who don't believe in god will swear up and down the bible is a great work of literature and morality just because they've been told that's what to expect inside. Any writing that admits a minimal level of confusion and imperfect clarity will induce the same effect if that's what the reader expects. You merely read your own insights into Plato because you are told to ponder it until you have an insight and it's a poorly written confusing work.
Obviously if your goal is to understand one particular ancient greek who died 2000 years ago rather than to progress in philosophy I take this all back but why the heck would you do that? Why not go dumpster diving for the guy who lives next door's journals and mail and memorize trivia about his life instead?
Your argument amounts to saying that amateurs in a field should be taken as seriously as experts, and can be applied just as readily to a biologist's frustration with a biblical literalist as a professor of philosophy's frustration with an overzealous undergrad. Some things simply take a very long time to learn and master. Dismissing excited amateurs might reveal the dismisser as a poor teacher, but nothing more than that.
One reason to read old thinkers is that you can be sure that, whatever their faults, their writings are not corrupted by whatever (possibly imperceptible to you) flaws or manipulations infect the discourse of your own time. I wrote a post about this here:
I agree with Vladimir and Curt Adams. If and when high-quality distillations are available, that's fine, but most second-hand sources are pretty terrible, and it's usually less work to just try to read the original (heavily annotated never hurts...) than to figure out which sources are trustworthy and read them.
Also, a lot of the gains from reading the originals comes more from how they thought or wrote than their discrete ideas. Plato is the best example of this -- you should expect to get no more out of a distillation of Theaetetus than you would get from a synopsis or summary of Shakespeare.
I agree with Prof. Hanson that it is discouraging to discover how much can be learned by reading the old masters, as it reflects on how little progress we've made. But that doesn't mean it's not worthwhile!
"[T]he main reason most people read famous thinkers is to raise their status via affiliation, and to prepare to signal how knowledgeable they are." Like Millian, I wonder about your empirical support for this assertion?
Famous thinkers from the not-to-distant past have *salience*; a reference to one of them allows one to point to a complex of ideas that is familiar to one's audience, without having actually to articulate it. Admittedly, the Classic Comic Books' version of the famous thinker's ideas--Kling's "distillation"--normally suffices for this purpose.
In my experience, the main reason for reading an old-time thinker's work is that one is a student, the teacher has assigned the work, and reading it will contribute to one's getting a good grade in the course. Perhaps ultimate the goal is signaling, but there is a much more specific proximate goal.
Am I just relearning what hundreds have already relearned century after century, but were just not able to pass on?
I liked to read the original works of old thinkers - Nietzsche, Max Weber and others.
I think you are right. What is the use? If you are looking for knowledge, it has already been extracted by others.
If you are looking for wisdom, there might be some, but nothing you can`t learn from other stuff as well. It just seems to be a prestige thing to read the classics by yourself.
Some ideas go through cycles of fashion. If the idea is right-on but currently out-of-fashion, it pays to read texts written when it was popular (which requires you going into the past). That's when you'll hear the pro arguments -- cheering on what's popular. If the idea is misleading but currently popular, it pays to read texts from when it was out-of-fashion -- those who wanted to "move beyond" the idea provided a million con arguments.
It's sad that -- for some big ideas -- rounding up all of the pro and con arguments requires us to look at different phases of the fashion cycle, because the how pro or con the arguments are largely depends on how popular it is, but sometimes that's life.
To give a few examples: almost all of early work on diet and metabolism up through WWII has been forgotten because it painted a less favorable view of carbs and sugars particularly, and that conflicts with the fashion for anti-fat and pro-carb diets. Gary Taubes in Good Calories Bad Calories rounds up a good deal of that forgotten biochemistry and anthropology work.
Same for behavioral economics. A lot of the central insights go at least back to Adam Smith, were pushed underground during the mid-20th C, but have recently come back into popularity. I'm talking not about empirical studies, since Smith didn't do any, but the theoretical framework that guides your thinking.
So, it's precisely because we use ideas as a means of affiliation that we have to read old thinkers. What the cool people affiliate with goes through fashion cycles, which introduces the two types of error above.
Oops! My apologies for the gross mistake I made in my above comment. The old post about philosophical majoritarianism that was linked in one of Prof. Hanson's recent posts, and which link I reproduced in the above post, was not written by him, but by another contributor. I made the inexcusable mistake of automatically assuming that the post was his from the way it was linked. Once again, I sincerely apologize for this blunder.
Still, the basic point of my above comment stands. One must either strongly reject philosophical majoritarianism, or assign a high value to the original works of old authors on at least some topics.
Every age has its own outlook. It is specially good at seeing certain truths and specially liable to make certain mistakes. We all, therefore, need the books that will correct the characteristic mistakes of our own period.
Prof. Hanson should consider this in the light of his thoughts on philosophical majoritarianism:
I admit and accept that my judgments are fundamentally flawed and my ability to correct and even perceive my own bias is highly questionable. [...] I choose to adopt the view that in general, on most issues, the average opinion of humanity will be a better and less biased guide to the truth than my own judgment.
But why limit this majoritarian view to the present human population? One could point out many beliefs that are accepted with near-consensus in reputable circles nowadays, but were questioned and rejected by the majority of people, including knowledgeable and intelligent authors, until relatively recently. Thus, it would seem that reading old authors in the original is critically important to evaluate such beliefs, since if the majority opinion of our age on these issues is heavily biased, it's highly unlikely that their ideas and arguments could ever reach us through modern "distillations" without being fatally distorted in the process.
Thus, I don't see how Prof. Hanson can reconcile his philosophical majoritarianism -- which, in order to be coherent, must necessarily also apply diachronically -- with his disregard for the original texts of old authors.
I think “distillations” of thinkers are generally a poor choice because of the possibility – likelihood, really – of serious distortions.
Yes! Most people greatly underestimate how bad such distortions usually are; modern "distillations" of old authors should indeed be presumed heavily distorted until proven otherwise. Sadly, even highly reputable authors usually see no problem with relying on N-th hand paraphrases, summaries, and hand-picked quotes unless the old author in question is the central focus of their work. As a result, heavily distorted "distillations" may well proliferate until they completely drown any realistic view of the original author.
The example that firmly convinced me of this was Adam Smith. For years, I had read countless authors paraphrasing and selectively quoting him in textbooks, press, scholarly books and articles, etc., with everyone more or less agreeing on his basic message. I never doubted that these "distillations" were more or less accurate -- until I finally read The Weath of Nations and realized that the real opinions of Adam Smith were in many important ways light years away from what they're typically presented to be.
Thanks for the post (i linked back to it from my site.) I'm not sure i agree with the status and affiliation. I liked your insight on out inability to advance sometimes.
Farnam Street is dedicated to the exploration of mental models with an emphasis on making our readers smarter.
I would distinguish between subject matter literacy and canonical text literacy for scientific fields.
It's the difference between being able to score above the 90th% on the GRE biology and having read a bunch of classicbooks like "The Origin of Species".
I'm as credentialist-prone as you, but reading many old, classic, texts in a field strikes me as one of the weaker credential signals for an active, evolving field of science.
So what? Unless you are in the history department you are theoretically trying to advance the understanding of economics/philosophy/whatever not discern what in particular some old dead guy felt about the subject.
Who cares if you end up thinking Smith had a different view than he did. He won't mind but the world will if that interferes with you learning more actual economics.
If that's what you mean than stop misleading people about it. Admit you just like the aesthetic/spiritual feelings it induces in you and want to do it for pleasure even though it retards the understanding of economics/philosophy/whatever by waisting time.
Then we could treat it just like going on a walk in nature and those of us who don't feel the appeal wouldn't be sneered at or pushed into it on the grounds of it beeing a good way to learn.
If you would gain nothing from a distillation that Plato is merely producing literature not valid intellectual insights about what's true.
I mean evidently you can recognize that Plato has these vital philosophical insights so what could possibly stop you from passing them on? Did he just stumble upon the best possible exposition and unlike any other originator of an idea never got confused....or did he just get lucky and get confused in exactly the right places to help later people understand more?
On what theory could Plato have had this amazing power that all his predecessors lacked? Do you really think he was that much smarter than everyone who has come since?
----
It's amazing how many people who don't believe in god will swear up and down the bible is a great work of literature and morality just because they've been told that's what to expect inside. Any writing that admits a minimal level of confusion and imperfect clarity will induce the same effect if that's what the reader expects. You merely read your own insights into Plato because you are told to ponder it until you have an insight and it's a poorly written confusing work.
Obviously if your goal is to understand one particular ancient greek who died 2000 years ago rather than to progress in philosophy I take this all back but why the heck would you do that? Why not go dumpster diving for the guy who lives next door's journals and mail and memorize trivia about his life instead?
Your argument amounts to saying that amateurs in a field should be taken as seriously as experts, and can be applied just as readily to a biologist's frustration with a biblical literalist as a professor of philosophy's frustration with an overzealous undergrad. Some things simply take a very long time to learn and master. Dismissing excited amateurs might reveal the dismisser as a poor teacher, but nothing more than that.
An Essay Concerning Human Understanding is by Locke.
One reason to read old thinkers is that you can be sure that, whatever their faults, their writings are not corrupted by whatever (possibly imperceptible to you) flaws or manipulations infect the discourse of your own time. I wrote a post about this here:
http://lesswrong.com/lw/1d1...
Oops - I hope this closes the tag.
I agree with Vladimir and Curt Adams. If and when high-quality distillations are available, that's fine, but most second-hand sources are pretty terrible, and it's usually less work to just try to read the original (heavily annotated never hurts...) than to figure out which sources are trustworthy and read them.
Also, a lot of the gains from reading the originals comes more from how they thought or wrote than their discrete ideas. Plato is the best example of this -- you should expect to get no more out of a distillation of Theaetetus than you would get from a synopsis or summary of Shakespeare.
I agree with Prof. Hanson that it is discouraging to discover how much can be learned by reading the old masters, as it reflects on how little progress we've made. But that doesn't mean it's not worthwhile!
"[T]he main reason most people read famous thinkers is to raise their status via affiliation, and to prepare to signal how knowledgeable they are." Like Millian, I wonder about your empirical support for this assertion?
Famous thinkers from the not-to-distant past have *salience*; a reference to one of them allows one to point to a complex of ideas that is familiar to one's audience, without having actually to articulate it. Admittedly, the Classic Comic Books' version of the famous thinker's ideas--Kling's "distillation"--normally suffices for this purpose.
In my experience, the main reason for reading an old-time thinker's work is that one is a student, the teacher has assigned the work, and reading it will contribute to one's getting a good grade in the course. Perhaps ultimate the goal is signaling, but there is a much more specific proximate goal.
Am I just relearning what hundreds have already relearned century after century, but were just not able to pass on?
I liked to read the original works of old thinkers - Nietzsche, Max Weber and others.
I think you are right. What is the use? If you are looking for knowledge, it has already been extracted by others.
If you are looking for wisdom, there might be some, but nothing you can`t learn from other stuff as well. It just seems to be a prestige thing to read the classics by yourself.
Some ideas go through cycles of fashion. If the idea is right-on but currently out-of-fashion, it pays to read texts written when it was popular (which requires you going into the past). That's when you'll hear the pro arguments -- cheering on what's popular. If the idea is misleading but currently popular, it pays to read texts from when it was out-of-fashion -- those who wanted to "move beyond" the idea provided a million con arguments.
It's sad that -- for some big ideas -- rounding up all of the pro and con arguments requires us to look at different phases of the fashion cycle, because the how pro or con the arguments are largely depends on how popular it is, but sometimes that's life.
To give a few examples: almost all of early work on diet and metabolism up through WWII has been forgotten because it painted a less favorable view of carbs and sugars particularly, and that conflicts with the fashion for anti-fat and pro-carb diets. Gary Taubes in Good Calories Bad Calories rounds up a good deal of that forgotten biochemistry and anthropology work.
Same for behavioral economics. A lot of the central insights go at least back to Adam Smith, were pushed underground during the mid-20th C, but have recently come back into popularity. I'm talking not about empirical studies, since Smith didn't do any, but the theoretical framework that guides your thinking.
So, it's precisely because we use ideas as a means of affiliation that we have to read old thinkers. What the cool people affiliate with goes through fashion cycles, which introduces the two types of error above.
Oops! My apologies for the gross mistake I made in my above comment. The old post about philosophical majoritarianism that was linked in one of Prof. Hanson's recent posts, and which link I reproduced in the above post, was not written by him, but by another contributor. I made the inexcusable mistake of automatically assuming that the post was his from the way it was linked. Once again, I sincerely apologize for this blunder.
Still, the basic point of my above comment stands. One must either strongly reject philosophical majoritarianism, or assign a high value to the original works of old authors on at least some topics.
C.S. Lewis (quoted by Thursday above):
Every age has its own outlook. It is specially good at seeing certain truths and specially liable to make certain mistakes. We all, therefore, need the books that will correct the characteristic mistakes of our own period.
Prof. Hanson should consider this in the light of his thoughts on philosophical majoritarianism:
I admit and accept that my judgments are fundamentally flawed and my ability to correct and even perceive my own bias is highly questionable. [...] I choose to adopt the view that in general, on most issues, the average opinion of humanity will be a better and less biased guide to the truth than my own judgment.
But why limit this majoritarian view to the present human population? One could point out many beliefs that are accepted with near-consensus in reputable circles nowadays, but were questioned and rejected by the majority of people, including knowledgeable and intelligent authors, until relatively recently. Thus, it would seem that reading old authors in the original is critically important to evaluate such beliefs, since if the majority opinion of our age on these issues is heavily biased, it's highly unlikely that their ideas and arguments could ever reach us through modern "distillations" without being fatally distorted in the process.
Thus, I don't see how Prof. Hanson can reconcile his philosophical majoritarianism -- which, in order to be coherent, must necessarily also apply diachronically -- with his disregard for the original texts of old authors.
Curt Adams:
I think “distillations” of thinkers are generally a poor choice because of the possibility – likelihood, really – of serious distortions.
Yes! Most people greatly underestimate how bad such distortions usually are; modern "distillations" of old authors should indeed be presumed heavily distorted until proven otherwise. Sadly, even highly reputable authors usually see no problem with relying on N-th hand paraphrases, summaries, and hand-picked quotes unless the old author in question is the central focus of their work. As a result, heavily distorted "distillations" may well proliferate until they completely drown any realistic view of the original author.
The example that firmly convinced me of this was Adam Smith. For years, I had read countless authors paraphrasing and selectively quoting him in textbooks, press, scholarly books and articles, etc., with everyone more or less agreeing on his basic message. I never doubted that these "distillations" were more or less accurate -- until I finally read The Weath of Nations and realized that the real opinions of Adam Smith were in many important ways light years away from what they're typically presented to be.
Thanks for the post (i linked back to it from my site.) I'm not sure i agree with the status and affiliation. I liked your insight on out inability to advance sometimes.
Farnam Street is dedicated to the exploration of mental models with an emphasis on making our readers smarter.