I agree: his is not a very useful comparison. I think David Foster Wallace gives the most accurate comparison I've read, and I always want to show it to those lucky souls who have never had to deal with this type of depression:
The so-called ‘psychotically depressed’ person who tries to kill herself doesn’t do so out of quote ‘hopelessness’ or any abstract conviction that life’s assets and debits do not square. And surely not because death seems suddenly appealing. The person in whom Its invisible agony reaches a certain unendurable level will kill herself the same way a trapped person will eventually jump from the window of a burning high-rise. Make no mistake about people who leap from burning windows. Their terror of falling from a great height is still just as great as it would be for you or me standing speculatively at the same window just checking out the view; i.e. the fear of falling remains a constant. The variable here is the other terror, the fire’s flames: when the flames get close enough, falling to death becomes the slightly less terrible of two terrors. It’s not desiring the fall; it’s terror of the flames. And yet nobody down on the sidewalk, looking up and yelling ‘Don’t!’ and ‘Hang on!’, can understand the jump. Not really. You’d have to have personally been trapped and felt flames to really understand a terror way beyond falling.
I had a blog post sitting in my drafts folder about Aaron Swartz and David Foster Wallace. It was waiting to make it perfect, but I don't think it ever will be. Thanks for this post, causing me to tidy it up and publish it.
I picked Infinite Jest up again about a month ago and had been wading through a lot of articles on DFW as a way of trying to understand his suicide. So that was the context in which Aaron's death came to me. I also saw the connection in Quinn's post and it had me wondering. Thanks for completing the post.
One thing people don't realise is that depression screws with your perception of the value of things, maybe a little, maybe a lot. Trying to logically balance things like a mathematical equation is not a useful way of looking at things when discussing depression.
The major characteristic of severe clinical depression is that it takes away enjoyment from all manner of activities that used to be enjoyable. People who haven't experienced it or who have never been close to someone in the depths of depression are unlikely to be able to comprehend it.
> I think David Foster Wallace gives the most accurate comparison I've read
I first bought a David Foster Wallace book last spring, I was on a lunch break, had entered a book-store, when I read on one of his books' back-covers that it had been written by a brilliant guy who had committed suicide. I wasn't thinking about suicide back then, I think I never did, I was just going through depression and I wanted to genuinely see what made people more depressed than me go the whole way. Suffice is to say that I was feeling like I knew the guy when reading his words, especially when he wrote about depression, like I seem to know and be familiar with all the people who describe what depression feels like.
And to go back to Jeff Atwood's piece, until you haven't experienced depression you cannot really understand what goes through a person's mind in moments like those, and even less so are you entitled to "accuse" the said person for "calling it quits" or whatever. Like I said, I never thought about suicide, but even in my mild depression I sort of could see the black light at the end of the tunnel and people who used to be like me not that long ago just giving it up and deciding to let go.
I like DFW's quote. I also like a point made by Nick Hornby in 'A long way down' that sometimes it is not because they don't want to live anymore, its because they want to live so much, but are being prevented from living by things beyond their control.
Yeah, my impression is it can (wrongly) seem like a rational choice among all the options. A friend of a friend recently jumped off the Bay Bridge. Before he did it, he explained that his schizophrenia meds made him mentally dull, bloated and unable to hold a job. In his mind, he was facing a life where either he constantly heard voices or couldn't live on his own, move out of his parents' house and so on. I hope researchers manage to solve this soon without the blunt hammer of current meds.
Do you really not understand the point or is that just another vacuous remark to accompany your first cliche? If the former, then perhaps you are making a case as to why liberal arts is still important in society: teaching students the ability to critically think and reach logical conclusions from texts with gaps in information, etc.
As an American that has recently moved to Germany, I do know that I pay significantly more income tax in Germany. I also know that a greater percentage of the population here is employed compared to the US, and that Germany also has a higher percentage of their GDP come from taxes. I was surprised to read your claims - do you have any good sources for them?
I do agree with you that in the case of US public services, money is not the real issue.
Short version - revenues aren't rates and both spending and gdp matter. (And, some assets aren't taxed - a huge fraction of Warren Buffet's fortune will never be taxed and none of his "I think rich people should pay more" proposals will change that. He's pushing taxes that other people will pay, often folks who he's trying to buy from.)
Yes. The Economist is also heavily advocating closing those `loopholes' instead of increasing the marginal rate. Today, only people with incompetent tax lawyers pay the highest marginal rates.
I realize it is easy to pick on philosphy, but if you're going to write off one of our oldest disciplines it should at least come from an informed place: "I think therefore I am" is not Descartes' premise, but one of his conclusions. Even as a conclusion, it is mostly misunderstood. The point is not that it is the thinking that brings one into being, but that there is something there that must exist in order to do the thinking. Other translations I have read have it "I am deceived, therefore I am," again the point being that something must first exist in order to be deceived. His original "arbitary premise" is that he must first discard everything he thinks he already knows.
Still, he dodges the question as to what it means that something exists. But I admit I haven't really read him. It is just that whenever I pick up a philosophy book (very rarely), I tend to hit upon false premises immediately.
Whenever I pick up a maths book, I read all these symbols that have no explanation whatsoever - it's obviously self-indulgent wanking. I admit I don't actually read the book, though, I just open it. But I can tell the symbols aren't english, or any other language I learned before my mind closed, so I can tell it's dross.
To jump in with the others, I think you'd enjoy Bartley's The Retreat to Commitment, where he raises similar sort of criticisms to the ones you talk about, but in a much more systematic way.
Generally speaking, people who were lucky enough to be born later in time have the advantage over people born earlier, since they can learn from those who come before. This isn't something you have to remember when looking at science since science in the news is if anything too focused on speculation or the latest result over what has been well confirmed - but philosophy has the opposite problem. People still talk about philosophers with ancient names, heavy with dignity even though their ideas have been challenged or extended since their time.
Really, nobody talking about truth should be failing to make a distinction between what is true and what is know since Godel did his work, but Descartes had the disadvantage of being born to early to know about that. In particular, his justifications fall afoul of the third horn of the Münchhausen Trilemma, by resorting to assuming some things as axiomatic. In particular, on reflection I'm baffled that Laplace can take "I think" as axiomatic but not "I am". Existence without though isn't hard to imagine (and some Laplacian demon might be imposing its thoughts on us), but thoughts without existence is. Perhaps if Laplace hadn't set out to prove the existence of God he wouldn't have had to make such odd assumptions.
Well, meditations wouldn't be a bad place to start. And philosophers differ a lot in their views of teh significance of philosophy. I regard it as self-indulgent, but interesting to those so inclined. Like Mathematics, it's an a priori subject anyone can do from an armchair. Unlike Mathematics, it isn't that useful for science. But unlike mathematics, it will help you achieve understanding about the structure of how you ordinarily think about the world (if not the world itself).
You can construe the cogito as an argument:
P1 I think.
P2 If I think, then I exist
C1 I exist.
P1 and P2 are premises, C1 is derived.
The interesting point is that P1 is not arbitrary, in the sense that if one grasps it, then it is true.
That's a really interesting property for a claim to have - especially for a contingent claim to have (e.g. 2+2=4 is necessarily true, and so if one grasps it, trivially it is true, but that's not interesting in the same way).
Further, D thinks that if one grasps it, then one knows one grasps it, (and that it is true).
So for D we have a priori certain knowledge of a contingent claim.
If course, you can question 2, and some people have. Quine is one person to read on that.
Re 'what does it mean to exist' - what do you mean by that? Your criticism demonstrates some ignorance of Descartes, as Descartes makes substantive claims about the nature of his existence as revealed by the reasonining in Mediations. For example D would say he knows that he exists as a thinking subject - a substantive claim about his nature. He goes on to make lots of controversial claims about his nature (some of which get us to Cartesian Dualism).
Given your comments, I'm would recommend W.V. Quine (staunchly realist, writes wonderfully clearly, very rigorous, a logician at heart). A good collection of basic essays is Quintessence, and a good first essay might be 'On What There Is'[1][2]. (Arguably his most important book-length work is Word and Object, but I wouldn't recommend starting there.) Here's the first paragraph (complete) to give you a sense of how well he writes:
>> A curious thing about the ontological problem is its simplicity. It can be put in three Anglo-Saxon monosyllables: ‘What is there?’ It can be answered, moreover, in a word—‘Everything’—and everyone will accept this answer as true. However, this is merely to say that there is what there is. There remains room for disagreement over cases; and so the issue has stayed alive down the centuries.
Gotta side with Tichy on this one. That sounds exactly like self-indulgent nonsense. Talk around the question, sound cute, but don't answer anything or even inform how you plan to proceed.
Don't think in terms of sides. I'm not "against" Tichy. He asked for reading recommendations, and I gave him one. I wasn't trying to prove him wrong about anything. I suggested Quine because he often appeals to mathematically minded realists, and I think he's very smart and writes well.
As for the article, try the whole thing before you judge it (it's not very long at all). Quine is not being frivolous, and he takes pains to explain exactly what he means as the piece goes on.
> Well name a philosophy book that is worth reading.
Plato's Dialogues and the Pre-Socratics, written 2500 years ago. By reading the above works you'll see that they contained all the important questions.
"Well name a philosophy book that is worth reading."
Asking what philosophy book to read is sort of like asking which math book to read.
The answer really depends on what you already know. You're probably not going to recommend that someone completely unfamiliar with math read a calculus textbook, much less an advanced math monogram.
Likewise, it's probably not a good idea to recommend that someone unfamiliar with philosophy read Heidegger. You're probably going to get some very basic recommendations.
Even then, you probably won't get much out of reading them without taking a class on the subject in which someone with vastly more experience and understanding than you can guide you and your peers to gain a greater appreciation of what you read, and to stimulate critical thought and discussion about the books you are reading. That's really the ideal setting for getting introduced to philosophy: as part of a class led by a talented teacher, and with some intelligent peers open to talking about the issues.
That said, you should not allow yourself to be misled in to thinking the toe that you dip in to the ocean of philosophy is going to be in any way representative, much less the "best" that philosophy has to offer.
Even were you to read a "great" book when you just start out, you're probably not going to understand much of it or get much out of it on your first go. Even professional philosophers go back again and again to classics, as they get more out of them each time, with the benefit of greater understanding, and being able to apply the insight and methods they've gained in the meantime to the books they've already read.
What I'm trying to say is that reading philosophy in a way that does justice to the topic is a lifetime endeavor. A one-time bite at any philosophy book just isn't going to give you even an inkling of an idea of what it's about.
Still, for an introduction to Western philosophy, you probably won't be able to do better than starting with the Socratic Dialogues. They are the source and the foundation of much of Western philosophy that's come afterwards, and you really can't properly understand most of the rest without reading this source.
I would strongly encourage you to read them as part of an Ancient Philosophy class at a university, for the reasons mentioned a few paragraphs earlier. Unfortunately, the philosophy departments of universities in the English speaking world tend to be dominated by the Analytic school of philosophy. So what you'll get from class will probably be biased in that direction. Just keep in mind that there are other ways of approaching and understanding the issues you read about than the ones you are exposed to in class.
This article resonated with me and it has nothing to do with poor management or exploitation or enemies: for some of us starting projects (personal or otherwise) is always a lot easier and more fun than finishing them. Finishing projects can just be hard. And this isn't just within the realm of programming, although there I find it especially true.
The comments here to this overall incredible speech are very surprising. I can't argue that it doesn't have any useful information/ideas, that is a subjective value judgement (as crazy as it seems to me); however, in what way is he trying to change the meaning of the word? One of the examples given in merriam-webster is:
extravagent respect or admiration for or devotion to an object of esteem <worship of the dollar>
While an interesting personal anecdote, your comment has nothing to do with what DFW is talking about. He touches on multiple platitudes throughout his speech (and names them as such): this is not one of them.
It relates in the following way. DFW presumes to know the internals of other people's minds, and to instruct them on how to be better. Same with the no-atheists-in-foxholes conjecture.
Is this serious? After reading my comment did you even bother re-reading the speech? By your analogy, every philosophical, psychological, sociological, et al text relates to the platitude your originally mentioned. The actual meaning of your original comment still has absolutely nothing to do with DFW's speech. This whole thread is like watching a student defend a paper about a book he never read and doesn't understand, but whose opinion is bolstered by yet more students with even less comprehension of the text than him.
No need to get upset, mon. I'm sure they just feel similarly.
I dislike this: Everybody worships. The only choice we get is what to worship.
To me that says people cannot choose what to do with their own minds. Like the atheists-in-foxholes saying, it denies a freedom that I cherish and denigrates a goal that I aspire to.
This is all very much a sidelight. We're just messing around on the internet, right? No hard feelings.
Your harsh words have been bothering me so I'm writing again.
* I did re-read the speech.
* Not every text relates to the foxholes platitude.
* Even if you don't think there's a connection between what I said and what DFW said, so what? We are on a tangent off a tangent off a tangent in the middle of the internet.
* I feel like you maybe are frustrated at somebody or something else and taking it out on me via the internet. Not nice.
I am yet another hacker with an undergrad in philosophy. The first college-level programming class I took (in high school, so before I had decided to major in either) was taught by a professor with his Masters in Philosophy and PhD in Computer Science. I think there is an incredibly strong correlation.
I don't think it comes to that. My working definition of art is 'human creativity in matters beyond functional necessity' - and the point (ideally) would be to selectively present phenomena/experience for the betterment of the audience.
Here black and white images of everyday urban life have been selected as subject matter. Why? (obviously the images are well framed, but is that all there is to this art? Mechanical_Fish's answer above is reasonable, though)
This is why I recommended Clive Bell: for him the subject matter is irrelevant and what matters is significant form - that combination of colors and shapes that gives rise to an aesthetic experience. Many would say that achieving this aesthetic experience itself is the point. Alternatively, others argue that the subject of art (in this case urban life) allow one to get at the capital-t Truth and meaning of a thing or culture. Heidegger's "The Origin of the Work of Art" examines this with regards to Van Gogh's "A Pair of Shoes," also an interesting read. Of course the real point for anyone is deeply personal, and if you're questioning what that point is, for you there probably isn't one. And that's ok too.
That's why I asked the question - I genuinely wanted to know what other people valued in this collection. Just because I asked doesn't mean I don't have my own reasons for valuing/not-valuing it. I encourage anyone reading to say what they liked about it. Even just a poll of 'do you like them for the content' vs 'do you like them for the prettyness' would be interesting: sometimes it's just good to know what other people are thinking.
I took the tour at Makers Mark distillery a few months ago (highly recommended), and they told a mostly similar story about Makers 46 (named after the number of attempts it took to get it right), but spun it as Bill Samuels, Jr. desire to "leave his mark." Although it is fun to find business lessons in everything (especially bourbon), I came away with a slightly more concrete example in brand loyalty after being introduced at the distillery to Marker's Mark's Ambassador program. It is pretty interesting: essentially it allows you to place your name on a barrel and recieve updates about its progress. When its finally ready, you have now earned the right to purchase your "own" bottle.
From what I understand the "46" is a shout-out to their supplier, because it is the product number of the wood staves used in the finishing process....
The so-called ‘psychotically depressed’ person who tries to kill herself doesn’t do so out of quote ‘hopelessness’ or any abstract conviction that life’s assets and debits do not square. And surely not because death seems suddenly appealing. The person in whom Its invisible agony reaches a certain unendurable level will kill herself the same way a trapped person will eventually jump from the window of a burning high-rise. Make no mistake about people who leap from burning windows. Their terror of falling from a great height is still just as great as it would be for you or me standing speculatively at the same window just checking out the view; i.e. the fear of falling remains a constant. The variable here is the other terror, the fire’s flames: when the flames get close enough, falling to death becomes the slightly less terrible of two terrors. It’s not desiring the fall; it’s terror of the flames. And yet nobody down on the sidewalk, looking up and yelling ‘Don’t!’ and ‘Hang on!’, can understand the jump. Not really. You’d have to have personally been trapped and felt flames to really understand a terror way beyond falling.