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The Lost Art of Research as Leisure

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Re: The Lost Art of Research as Leisure

#181

Post by NalNezumi »

mmooss wrote: post #174
NalNezumi wrote: post #171

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[dead]

I'm sure you are aware of the culture war, and that your comment fits right into it. If you didn't mean it, I assume you'd say something different.

I think you are projecting, if you have to use phrases such as "I'm sure you are aware...". I'm not but you can inform me. For context I'm not American, I lived in Asia for the last 6 years very detached from that beyond my regular tech-news om HN, relevant to my profession.

I'm on the side of the author in that I did research as work, and also keep doing it on my spare time. I just get my bs sensor Activated when someone try to pad words to create a sentiment rather than argument to make their ideas appealing. I've read enough feel good arguments

"see everyone agrees with me!" is not a strong argument, it's a sentiment. But maybe you could point out my bias that I'm not aware of

Re: The Lost Art of Research as Leisure

#182

Post by BeetleB »

mmooss wrote: post #170
BeetleB wrote: post #161

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think people are confused by the definitions of primary/secondary sources. As an example, almost all textbooks are actually secondary sources. The primary source may be a journal article. And yes, often, those secondary sources are far superior than the primary sources. Insisting on reading all those journal articles as opposed to a good textbook is simply indulging in a fetish, IMO.

> I think people are confused by the definitions of primary/secondary sources. Sorry: Primary - the actual evidence. The actual letter written by Jefferson; the ice core itself, etc. For example, if you are an historian writing about Jefferson, you actually travel to the archive and read Jefferson's letters and look through the other papers, etc. - the actual stuff. Secondary - the journal article, the scholarly book…

> WTF do you know about me or anyone else to judge their choices?

I don't, and did not claim to. And yes, one can and usually does judge at some level. I don't need to know much about someone to have an opinion that intentionally touching random strangers' private parts in public is problematic.

Try not to be so sensitive. My comment was not a criticism of anyone.

> Your ignorance of the need for direct knowledge of things shines through.

Now who is making assumptions without knowing me?

I spent years being paid to do research at academic institutions, so it's not a random person on the Internet saying it. Sometimes the primary source is fantastic. More often it's inferior to better written pieces.

The reason journals like Rev Modern Physics have a high impact factor is precisely due to the fact that distillations can be superior to primary sources. It's a journal where a highly influential person in the field writes a (lengthy) journal article that is basically a well written, accessible tutorial of the whole field.

Have you tried reading Maxwell's original works? Do you not think there's a good reason pretty much every EM textbook teaches Maxwell's equations in a very different form from what he proposed?

Re: The Lost Art of Research as Leisure

#183

Post by bumby »

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…

I think it’s latent status signaling. Humans are hierarchical primates and we search for status in our social groups. To that end, it’s not much different than other social creatures that seek social status in their tribe/pride/pack/pod.

Re: The Lost Art of Research as Leisure

#184

Post by dkarl »

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…

Being "seen and validated" translates to "feeling superior" when people want to be seen and validated on a scale that very few other people are, and I think many people naively want this.

Re: The Lost Art of Research as Leisure

#185

Post by SeaGully »

ravenstine wrote: post #32
tokai wrote: post #5

Don't buy it at all. Global book market is healthy and as big as it ever was. Most of us a reading more in a day that even scholars did in a month two centuries ago. It has never been more accessible to research any kind of subject and phenomenon than it is now. The article is rolling out the same old bourgeois doomsday theory people like Stefan Zweig and McLuhan subscribed to. Luckily the democratization of literacy…

This is why my brain kind of short-circuits when I'm asked the question "do you like to read?" I know what most people actually mean by that, but my gears start turning because not only do I know that I read more than any of my ancestors. Reading is like breathing to me. I guess I do it out of leisure in a sense, but it's a way of life in many respects. Perhaps I don't read much fiction, but not a day goes by that I'…

The boom of Romantasy seems to be attributed at least partially to GenZ. So depending on how you classify reading Sci-Fi/Fantasy/Romantasy GenZ is definitely still reading.

Re: The Lost Art of Research as Leisure

#186

Post by mmooss »

awongh wrote: post #179
mmooss wrote: post #158

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you are researching economics, then Marx is a secondary (or higher order) source. The econmomic data used by Marx is primary. If you are researching Marx the person or Marx's ideas, then [edit: Marx's writings would be primary sources, and then] what would you think of someone who only read others talking about Marx, but didn't read Marx's actual writings? It wouldn't make much sense for anything called 'research'…

> The econmomic data used by Marx is primary Literally picking through tables of all economic data for the last century... shocked pikachu meme not sure what that would gain you....

Well, that's how actual research is done - that's what people do. It defines research, it's how they write all those (research-based) books and journal articles. That's scholarship - science, social science, humanities, etc. That's why Darwin travelled all the way to the Galapagos Islands - he identified a place to do primary resesarch on the questions he was investigating.

Journalists also - they look at the actual evidence and turn it into something coherent and cohesive for others to understand; the location in the byline/dateline shows where they went - that is, that if they wrote about Odessa, the dateline should show if they actually went to Odessa and saw it for themself.

Back to research: If you mean it's impractical for many people, that's often true. Some topics require less expertise, expense, and time: for example, tracking local bird populations. But those real natural scientists, the amateur researchers who get published, that's what they are doing. Pretty amazing!

If you don't want to do it, that's fine; few do. If you want to read secondary sources on a topic - wonderful (but read good ones based on primary sources; only accept what is tied back to actual, hard-won facts - necessary are the footnotes, which connect the secondary claim to the primary fact). If you want to read tertiary sources, find quality ones. If you want to read social media, have fun but it's just entertainment - to the extent it's accurate, you can't know unless you already have expertise.

Re: The Lost Art of Research as Leisure

#187

Post by saulpw »

brightball wrote: post #19

I started reading history as a hobby a few years after college when I heard some things from people that just didn’t make sense or didn’t seem true. So I picked up a booked that was well cited, read it while checking the citations after each chapter. Between the Library of Congress and Google, checking original sources has never been easier. It was a really mind blowing exercise. Much more interesting than fiction. W…

> What’s funny is that history is the subject I was least interested in all through school.

Indeed, history is largely lost on kids. You need to see some real world events play out before you can care about history.

I also think, if you're going to teach history to children, it should be taught in reverse chronology. Basically here's what's happening now, and that's due to what happened last year, which is due to what happened last decade, etc. Work your way back to the Greeks and Babylonians. Like James Burke's Connections.

Re: The Lost Art of Research as Leisure

#188

Post by dustincoates »

thinkingtoilet wrote: post #35
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…

I always love this conversation: Snob: "Listening to an audio book doesn't count as reading the book!" Everyone else in the world: "k"

I saw elsewhere that someone said it was ablist to say that an audiobook doesn't count as a book, which I could only think that we put too much importance on books.

Don't take this as an anti-intellectual screed. Far from it--I read a lot. But I think you can also learn from magazines, newspapers, plays, orations, etc. It leads to this weird situation where people are optimizing not for what they're learning but for the count. How many books have you read this year? Does an audiobook count? Like... it doesn't really matter.

Re: The Lost Art of Research as Leisure

#189

Post by [deleted] »

BeetleB wrote: post #182
mmooss wrote: post #170

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I think people are confused by the definitions of primary/secondary sources. Sorry: Primary - the actual evidence. The actual letter written by Jefferson; the ice core itself, etc. For example, if you are an historian writing about Jefferson, you actually travel to the archive and read Jefferson's letters and look through the other papers, etc. - the actual stuff. Secondary - the journal article, the scholarly book…

> WTF do you know about me or anyone else to judge their choices? I don't, and did not claim to. And yes, one can and usually does judge at some level. I don't need to know much about someone to have an opinion that intentionally touching random strangers' private parts in public is problematic. Try not to be so sensitive. My comment was not a criticism of anyone. > Your ignorance of the need for direct knowledge of…

[deleted]

Re: The Lost Art of Research as Leisure

#190

Post by dustincoates »

i_love_retros wrote: post #25
brightball wrote: post #19

I started reading history as a hobby a few years after college when I heard some things from people that just didn’t make sense or didn’t seem true. So I picked up a booked that was well cited, read it while checking the citations after each chapter. Between the Library of Congress and Google, checking original sources has never been easier. It was a really mind blowing exercise. Much more interesting than fiction. W…

Curious, what events are documented in the bible that correspond to actual historical events? Does it have good historical accuracy for the time it was written? (forgive my ignorance, I have never read the bible) Have you read Jerusalem by Simon Sebag Montefiore? I admit I didn't finish it, but what I did read was very interesting. Although I admittedly didn't fact check it.

The Bible is a mixture of history, poetry, wisdom literature, and much more. There's a really fascinating study Bible (ESV Archaeology Study Bible) that does a fantastic job of putting everything into its historical, sociopolitical, and geographical context.
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