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The Lost Art of Research as Leisure

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Re: The Lost Art of Research as Leisure

#121

Post by markus_zhang »

thinkingtoilet wrote: post #36
markus_zhang wrote: post #28

Don't know about you guys, but reading has become more and more of a burden for me. It is as if -- I have greatly narrowed my interest such that most books are not interesting any more. Even the sci-fi and fantasy books, once I loved, lost their magic. Nowadays there are only two types of books that excite me: 1) those about software/hardware engineering, such as iWoz(I even bought a few Tom Swift JR books for my son…

I wonder if after you've read the classics and modern greats you have to start searching out and take chances on books you don't know. I also think people will happily walk away from a show or movie but for some reason won't walk away from a book. If you're 30% in and you hate it, just walk away.

Yeah I feel that too. It's kinda hard to go away from a book, even a borrowed one and I have no idea why. Maybe I'm trying to convince myself that I should like the book but I don't.

I used to read a lot of books including classics and others when I was younger, before 25, but then Internet took off so I barely read books. When my son was born a few years ago I tried to go back and found my interests narrowed to a niche.

Anyway, maybe I shouldn't complain as it helps to focus...

Re: The Lost Art of Research as Leisure

#122

Post by thriw7383848 »

piva00 wrote: post #111
lazyasciiart wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This commenter certainly doesn’t appear to be a native English speaker, what makes you assume they are American?

Not assuming they're American, I'm blaming the discourse in American society which spills over to other societies in the age of information, if you know English it's impossible to not be affected by USA's bullshit on the internet.

[flagged]

Re: The Lost Art of Research as Leisure

#123

Post by magicmicah85 »

markus_zhang wrote: post #119
magicmicah85 wrote: post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Perhaps you have just found your niche. Like the person who reads romantasy or the person who reads history, you like engineering and existentialism (not an uncommon pairing) and you get something out of it. From the age of 20 to 38, I had a hard time reading books. I grew up reading Tolkien, Dan Simmons, Timothy Zahn, but the internet exploding in speeds and online content replaced my reading habits. So I moved to j…

Yeah you could be right. I'm actually in a similar boat. I used to read a lot of fictions before 25-ish but then I got hooked by the Internet so I rarely read any books since then. I used to enjoy Tolkien and D&D novels a LOT but recently I found them to be meh.

Fiction is hard for me too, but I was able to reincorporate it by making it more social. I joined a local book club and they often read fiction books, so it's usually the better fiction out there and not stuff that I would pick out myself. I almost make it like a reading assignment, but if I don't like it, I will just not read it and say I didn't like it and listen to the discussion.

My wife also reads fiction so occasionally I'll read a book she is so we have something to talk about.

Re: The Lost Art of Research as Leisure

#124

Post by mmooss »

_fat_santa wrote: post #102
awongh wrote: post #84

I read a fair amount and I actually do research as leisure all the time, but I can’t stand these elitist and unoriginal think pieces about how much better and cooler this person’s habits are than yours. >> for the leisurely researcher, self-study must include the discipline’s foundational texts I feel like this person has some kind of dark academia aesthetic fetish that they need to hold onto to feel superior to ever…

Personally I still go on Wikipedia deep dives where you end up going from link to link for hours. I think the author is entirely incorrect with that quote, the whole idea of leasure research is that there are no rules, some will go ask an LLM, others will go read 'foundational text' while others will just browse Wikipedia.

If that's what you like to do, of course that's fine. If we are going to talk with each other about what we like to do, we need to agree on meaning.

In my thinking, the definition of research is to find truth. As ultimate solutions to that goal, Wikipedia and LLM output lack sufficient accuracy and lack verifiability. Many find them useful as bibliographic tools that point us to accurate, verifiable sources.

Also, research requires looking at the actual evidence - the primary sources; that's where the truth is, that's the foundation of the scientific method. Secondary sources filter the truth through someone else's interpretation, but for amateur researchers that may be all that's realistic - traveling to archives, building or using complex equipment is not realistic. Still, Wikipedia and (almost all) LLMs are tertiary or higher order sources: they are a combination of secondary or higher order sources - Wikipedia doesn't allow citing primary sources as far as I know (which would be necessary for Wikipedia to be a secondary source); LLM input is mostly secondary or higher order sources.

I don't object if you call reading Wikipedia, 'research'. I don't at all object to you doing what you value. But we are talking about two different things.

Re: The Lost Art of Research as Leisure

#125

Post by kevinsync »

awongh wrote: post #84

I read a fair amount and I actually do research as leisure all the time, but I can’t stand these elitist and unoriginal think pieces about how much better and cooler this person’s habits are than yours. >> for the leisurely researcher, self-study must include the discipline’s foundational texts I feel like this person has some kind of dark academia aesthetic fetish that they need to hold onto to feel superior to ever…

>> I feel like this person has some kind of dark academia aesthetic fetish that they need to hold onto to feel superior to everyone else.

The older I get, the more I'm convinced that people do this less to actually feel superior to others and more as a desperate act of establishing an identity, ANY identity, to simply feel seen and validated in spite of just being yet another person on the planet. This uniquely-human trait seems to run counter to the natural order, where spotted leopards, panthers, elephants, myriad birds all just exist and go about their lives, despite their objective, innate individualities.

We are curious creatures lol

Re: The Lost Art of Research as Leisure

#126

Post by jll29 »

nluken wrote: post #100
awongh wrote: post #84

I read a fair amount and I actually do research as leisure all the time, but I can’t stand these elitist and unoriginal think pieces about how much better and cooler this person’s habits are than yours. >> for the leisurely researcher, self-study must include the discipline’s foundational texts I feel like this person has some kind of dark academia aesthetic fetish that they need to hold onto to feel superior to ever…

I think you're generally right about the OP, but I don't see your alternative method as a tonic to the problem the author is discussing. I agree that treating reading as the only way to ingest information is probably wrong, and that the original post tends towards hierarchy in an almost reactionary way, yet at the same time I also see that many people tend to ingest information from other forms of media less critical…

> I agree that treating reading as the only way to ingest information is probably wrong

The good news is that not only does the "private researcher" (curious individual person without a research background or job) nowadays have the ability to read online in far-removed libraries, they are even empowered to download the data of many studies, fire up their Jupyter notebooks to replicate some work.

The danger is that some wannabes create even more noise on the proper science channels that are already polluted by fraudsters generating fake papers via ChatGPT and friends... making it harder for the untrained eye to distinguish between respectable science and pseudo-science.

Re: The Lost Art of Research as Leisure

#127

Post by awongh »

mmooss wrote: post #116
awongh wrote: post #84

I read a fair amount and I actually do research as leisure all the time, but I can’t stand these elitist and unoriginal think pieces about how much better and cooler this person’s habits are than yours. >> for the leisurely researcher, self-study must include the discipline’s foundational texts I feel like this person has some kind of dark academia aesthetic fetish that they need to hold onto to feel superior to ever…

> can’t stand these elitist and unoriginal think pieces about how much better and cooler Aren't you saying the same thing, putting them down? You could both be curious about each other.

I commented on the article so I suppose I'm engaging with the ideas.

To be clear, I also think it's a shame that people don't read as many books these days, I don't read a huge amount but I feel like I'm at the higher-end of my social circle in terms of reading volume.

Mostly, I don't like the trope that there's some kind of moral imperative to Read More Books and that Things Used to Be Better. Overall I'm philosophically disinclined to draw the conclusion that phones/attention/social media are bad and reading more will improve society. I also have TikTok but I don't think it makes me a worse person.

Re: The Lost Art of Research as Leisure

#128

Post by deepsun »

sethammons wrote: post #52
pplonski86 wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Could you please recommend some history books?

A people's history of the united states is a good one. Most history is written by the generals and leaders. This account is colored by the oft ignored people.

> Critics assert blatant omissions of important historical episodes, uncritical reliance on biased sources, and failure to examine opposing views.

Re: The Lost Art of Research as Leisure

#129

Post by mmooss »

pjmorris wrote: post #78
sethammons wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A people's history of the united states is a good one. Most history is written by the generals and leaders. This account is colored by the oft ignored people.

I took someone's suggestion to read a more orthodox US history 'A History of the American People', Paul Johnson, before diving in to the Zinn book.

How do you compare them? Johnson, iirc, is conservative (is that right?); Zinn is liberal.

Re: The Lost Art of Research as Leisure

#130

Post by awongh »

mmooss wrote: post #124
_fat_santa wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Personally I still go on Wikipedia deep dives where you end up going from link to link for hours. I think the author is entirely incorrect with that quote, the whole idea of leasure research is that there are no rules, some will go ask an LLM, others will go read 'foundational text' while others will just browse Wikipedia.

If that's what you like to do, of course that's fine. If we are going to talk with each other about what we like to do, we need to agree on meaning. In my thinking, the definition of research is to find truth . As ultimate solutions to that goal, Wikipedia and LLM output lack sufficient accuracy and lack verifiability. Many find them useful as bibliographic tools that point us to accurate, verifiable sources. Also, r…

> In my thinking, the definition of research is to find truth

> the primary sources; that's where the truth is

I mentioned this elsewhere on the thread, but I also feel like the most influential primary sources are less important than secondary sources- if you read Marx, the social and political circumstances of his ideas are in the context of an industrial economy and just don't apply in the same way anymore.

You can draw your own conclusions directly from what's written, but what's the point of that? I feel like it's more useful to engage with those ideas keeping in mind all of the thought and history that's happened since- in that case you would wait a pretty long time to work backwards until you read the original.

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