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The Lost Art of Research as Leisure

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Re: The Lost Art of Research as Leisure

#131

Post by jll29 »

I like the idea of collecting a list of books that you would take with you on a remote island. Imagine you would never leave that island, what would you take?

- The Art of Computer Programming I-IVb

- Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs

- Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid

- Lions' Commentary on UNIX 6th Edition

- ...

or perhaps

- The Bible

- The Scouting Guide to Wilderness First Aid: An Officially-Licensed Book of the Boy Scouts of America: More than 200 Essential Skills for Medical ... in Remote Environments (A BSA Scouting Guide)

- ...?

Re: The Lost Art of Research as Leisure

#132

Post by aaronbaugher »

tpoacher wrote: post #65
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 have exactly the same experience, and in fact, I'm slowly starting to lose interest in the 'nerdy' books too. However, I don't necessarily think the problem is books. I think the problem is 'time', and how reading has evolved in my life to be less about "the enjoyment of the action of reading" into "the necessity of acquiring the information" (even if that 'necessity' is intended for 'leisure' / 'pleasure'). It's a…

That's where I'm at. Not just with books, but with movies and games, it just feels like too much time to commit to a single leisure activity. And I'm not a workaholic or super busy otherwise, so I could make the time to enjoy a book. It's just a mindset I didn't used to have, that says I shouldn't just read a book and enjoy it, but should be taking notes and learning something while I do, or listening to the audiobook so I can do some other tasks at the same time.

I'm not sure how that happened, but it feels like it happened to a lot of us.

Re: The Lost Art of Research as Leisure

#133

Post by cjbgkagh »

kevinsync wrote: post #125
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…

Plenty of animals go out of their way to be seen. If it’s a pretty bird it’s most likely a male bird.

Animals at play do appear to show off to each other. Orcas wear salmons as hats as if it was a fast fashion trend.

I don’t think humans are unique in this regard at all.

Re: The Lost Art of Research as Leisure

#134

Post by BoredPositron »

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…

It really reads like he would like to be a British country parson in the 19th century.

Re: The Lost Art of Research as Leisure

#135

Post by PaulHoule »

Marshall McLuhan also thought television would displace reading but I think it only happened for real when YouTube came along in that YouTube vastly expanded the availability of non-fiction TV.

One example is the disappearance of text guides for video games: circa 2010 you could still find good FAQs and walkthroughs such that if you got stuck or were trying to work out the dependencies in a Neptunia game such that you need items A, B and C to make item D and you'll have to visit locations E, F and F' (a variant of F you can unlock by making a "plan") you could do it efficiently.

Now for a 30 hour game you have to find the right place in 30 hours worth of video -- once in a while you are stuck because there is some place where you can jump where it doesn't look like you can jump and just seeing somebody do it in a video makes it totally clear, but just as often somebody in the video took a different route or has a different build and you've got no freakin' idea even after watching the video. There was already a problem for games like Pokemon where walkthroughs were problematic because of the high variance of builds, but it's far worse in video where you want a database more than you want a walkthrough.

Re: The Lost Art of Research as Leisure

#136

Post by mmooss »

Der_Einzige wrote: post #77
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.

These days, Howard Zinn, Chomsky, and most other left wing intellectuals of yesteryear have lost their cultural power. It doesn’t help that most of these folks are 1. So sold into the “American intelligence bad” narrative that they look at every left wing crack point and act like nothing bad happened under them. Even Allende, the classic example of a “good Marxist” leader, was a total asshole and likely deserved to b…

> lost their cultural power

Should people only read what's popular, what the dominant culture approves of? Are more unpopular ideas more wrong? You apparently dislike Chomsky; would you have liked Chomsky more when those books were more popular?

> the “American intelligence bad” narrative

You are ignorant of these issues if that is your understanding. Certainty also seems to support that, as does the ranting.

Re: The Lost Art of Research as Leisure

#137

Post by sergioisidoro »

mvieira38 wrote: post #80
sergioisidoro wrote: post #34

I think reading is an essential skill, but we also need to get reading out of the pedestal. Because a lot of the time these arguments come across as some sort of literary elitism. Like if you're not ingesting information through reading, it doesn't count. This month I spent many hours listening to lectures on youtube about geopolitics on the Asian continent from the naval war college. Sure I could have read it, but n…

Listening to a lecture is a far more passive form of learning than reading a book. Being an avid reader is seen as special because it requires more time and effort to do: you just can't read while doing the dishes or morning cardio or running unit tests. Also, by reading challenging books you learn the valuable skills of backtracking and skimming, which may be applied to better and more quickly understand difficult t…

Ok I'm going to invert that thought, and say: if books are so intelectually more efficient, why do we even have universities? Why do we have lectures, and why doesn't everyone just read?

Spoken word is one of the most primitive and human ways of communicating information. Written word appeared as a replacement to spoken word, because there was no other capable medium of information. Now we have mediums capable of doing so, why not use them instead.

Also you're somehow implying that because I'm doing the dishes I'm paying less attention? I think that's a really big assumption, and will probably vary a lot from person to person.

Re: The Lost Art of Research as Leisure

#138

Post by deegles »

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…

Yes, because of course I have 20 extra hours per week to dedicate to focused research

Re: The Lost Art of Research as Leisure

#139

Post by mmooss »

NalNezumi wrote: post #33

The blog post gives a slight posh impression. With the excessive quoting of authors and their book but in an incoherent manner that only strengthen the authors narrative by "look many famous people agree with me" and not why they agree with you. I agree with the general sentiment of the article but I think it kinda defeat itself in its need to reaffirm it's own excellence over actually being informative. He could've…

> The blog post gives a slight posh impression.

I don't know about that, but so what if it did? Why is it even worth remarking on?

I care about the value of their ideas; they don't need to pass a culture war test first.

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