I find pg's earlier writings, like this one, to be the best.
What You Can't Say (2004)
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Re: What You Can't Say (2004)
#12Do you think you'll raise your children to believe in Santa, HN?
in the culture i was raised in (indian), santa was treated as a shared joke between parents and kids - there would be some anonymous presents under the tree and our parents would insist that santa had placed them there, and we would groan and try to get them to admit it was them, and everyone would laugh about it. if i had kids i would almost certainly bring them up with a similar system, regardless of where we were living at the time.
Re: What You Can't Say (2004)
#13Do you think you'll raise your children to believe in Santa, HN?
Honestly I will probably do as my parents did. I will buy christmas presents, label them "From: Santa", and I'll put them under the tree in the middle of the night, and I will decline to explain how they got there. My children can choose or decline to believe whatever rumors are swirling around the neighborhood. EDIT: personally I never asked about it because I didn't want to risk stopping the gifts.
That is pretty much what my parents did. I turned out alright. And that is pretty much what we are doing. I would rather my kids blindly believe in Santa than blindly believe in God. They will need to reach an age where they must question both of those things for themselves.
Re: What You Can't Say (2004)
#14I find that in engineering circles theology and the notion of the existence of God is one of those 'moral taboos.' And advocating more nuclear power stations or private gun ownership.
It is fascinating that were you to advocate gun control in the late 19th century, it seems nearly everyone would have laughed you out of the room. But that sentiment has reversed here in the 21st century.
Always interesting to think about.
Re: What You Can't Say (2004)
#15Do you think you'll raise your children to believe in Santa, HN?
I plan to not, on principle, but who can say for sure until they've actually experienced raising a child?
Re: What You Can't Say (2004)
#16This is probably my favorite essay from PG. I think about it at least once a week. It's easy to get caught up in a world of professionalism, which is just a fancy word for acting like you aren't human, and go through every day doing social norms just because they are social norms. This essay reminds me to stop and think about the things that I do and see other people doing.
Re: What You Can't Say (2004)
#17Do you think you'll raise your children to believe in Santa, HN?
[deleted]
Re: What You Can't Say (2004)
#18Do you think you'll raise your children to believe in Santa, HN?
One of my earliest memories is of Christmas eve, sharing a room at a relative's house with my younger siblings. It was some time after midnight, my siblings were asleep. I heard a rustling outside and, knowing santa was purportedly coming, I pretended to sleep and kept one eye very slightly open.
In comes Santa. I can just make out his big fat belly, red suit, white beard, and a big sack. He unloads presents in various places around the room. Then, as he's leaving, the light from the slightly open door catches his face and I realise it's my dad in a Santa outfit. I remember very distinctly feeling crushed and exhilarated at the same time. Santa wasn't real, but I'd found out what grown-ups know.
I planned to confront my dad about it the next day. When I woke up there were sooty bootprints in the fireplace, and my siblings were just so incredibly excited about the whole thing that I didn't have the heart to bring it up.
There are few things outside of fantasy that will create that feeling for a child. Reaching a level of maturity where you get that excited about the real world is a rite of passage. So that's what I'm going to do. I don't care if my kids believe in Christmas or whatever, but if there's some fantasy that enriches their lives without harming them, I'll commit to it until they grow out of it.
Re: What You Can't Say (2004)
#19Earlier quoted context omitted.
This article was published in 2004.
But it is no less true now. If anything the explosion of ubiquitous and instantaneous social media has only exacerbated the tendencies towards branding unorthodox thinking as Thoughtcrime as a twittermob of snark and hatred can be summoned in hours if not minutes.
Yeah I was thinking the same thing.
Social media, at it's core, glorifies groupthink, rewarding you handsomely with stars and likes when you say the right thing. In time, you start thinking of what you should be saying, and then you start wondering what you should be posting so that you're perceived as a certain type of person. And when you start down that path, it feels like you become a bit more intellectually subservient. If your concern is always how to please people, how can you be expected to explore heresies? How can you plumb the depths of the unknown to explore and discover things when you concern yourself with safety?
The immediacy of the medium rewards snark and off-the-cuff remarks instead of analysis, insight, and distance. It incentivizes heated discussion (as it garners more pageviews!) and cheap, "me too" posts. It generates a fear of missing out, which is used to manipulate visitors into consuming more and more content for less and less value, exactly like any addictive substance.
Re: What You Can't Say (2004)
#20tlwrl; Now that pg has more time to dive into the meta-er layers, guess we'll see some progress with the Arc language.
As someone foolish enough to build a production-grade tool with arc back in the day, I'd say that Clojure has taken most of the best ideas from arc already.
I think arc still had few good tricks related to code brevity though that never got adopted by Clojurists (they would require a custom sexp reader to be bolted into Clojure to port them) but almost all of the other good stuff from arc made it into Clojure, and Clojure had many fantastic ideas that greatly improved on arc.