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Thomas Jefferson's Letter to His Nephew Peter

avalon.law.yale.edu

21–30 of 60 posts

Re: Thomas Jefferson's Letter to His Nephew Peter

#21

Give up money, give up fame, give up science, give the earth itself and all it contains, rather than do an immoral act. And never suppose, that in any possible situation, or under any circumstances, it is best for you to do a dishonorable thing, however slightly so it may appear to you. Whenever you are to do a thing, though it can never be known but to yourself, ask yourself how you would act were all the world look…

Talk to me when you don't apply current political and social ideals to pre-industrial revolution America 200 years ago.

Re: Thomas Jefferson's Letter to His Nephew Peter

#22

Give up money, give up fame, give up science, give the earth itself and all it contains, rather than do an immoral act. And never suppose, that in any possible situation, or under any circumstances, it is best for you to do a dishonorable thing, however slightly so it may appear to you. Whenever you are to do a thing, though it can never be known but to yourself, ask yourself how you would act were all the world look…

http://lesswrong.com/lw/jb/applause_lights/

It's possible to do nuanced analysis of that era, Jefferson's beliefs, his treatment of his slaves relative to other slaveowners, the fact that he freed them on his death, and the things he wrote about in his letters to contemporaries - if you read his letters, he constantly questioned slavery and had misgivings about it, but it was the norm for the era.

You could make intelligent points about it. But you haven't done so. This "until then you can fuck off" is petty, it doesn't open anyone's mind - if you wanted to, you could put some thought into it and try to make a more nuanced, intelligent argument. Broadly condemning with profanity, no nuance, it doesn't change anyone's mind or enlighten anyone.

Re: Thomas Jefferson's Letter to His Nephew Peter

#23
post #5
post #4

Awesome read, though Jefferson seems to have suffered from the "these are facts because I said so" type of thinking. Here are some relevant quotes: "Sitting up late at night is injurious to the health, and not useful to the mind." "Games played with the ball, and others of that nature, are too violent for the body, and stamp no character on the mind." "As to the species of exercise, I advise the gun. [snip] Let your…

>long-relaxing-walks-while-hunting kind yep. bird hunting i think.

Yeah this used to be pretty common, especially for schoolchildren for at least 100 years after Jefferson's time to "walk" home while hunting.

Re: Thomas Jefferson's Letter to His Nephew Peter

#24
post #18
post #2

It's amazing how much the wonders of technology and readily accessible information have screwed up the value many children in the past 3ish generations (my marker for the beginning of the decline is WWII reconstruction). A "renaissance man" now is a dilettante. In Jefferson's day it meant having both broad and deep knowledge. One could argue that the advances of science have made this impossible in modern times but I…

A "renaissance man" now is a dilettante. In Jefferson's day it meant having both broad and deep knowledge. One could argue that the advances of science have made this impossible in modern times but I disagree. I believe you're being too fast to dismiss that argument. As is pointed out in http://www.its.caltech.edu/~dg/crunch_art.html , from Jefferson's day to relatively recently, the output in scientific journals inc…

I do think breadth and depth have expanded, but I think fundamentally less than the explosion in page count would suggest. There has also been a big decrease in signal-to-noise ratio, with a lot of crap published in journals, and not enough gardening work. IMO a much bigger proportion of scientific resources need to be put into survey articles, "recent advances in X" retrospectives, post-intro-level textbooks and tutorials, and even ideally some cross-field work, matching up equivalent/redundant ideas and harmonizing terminology. In academia at least, the incentives don't encourage that, though: even though a survey article is probably the single quickest way to have significant impact on a field (they're widely read, and you're forging the lens through which many subsequent people will view that field), they're not as well respected for advancement purposes as even very niche original research is.

As it is, tons of stuff keeps getting reinvented just because the state of the literature is so bad that you'll never find it, unless it was invented exactly in your sub-sub-specialty, or you serendipitously found it via a colleague who remarked that what you were doing sounded similar to something he once read.

The decline in scientists writing books also doesn't help. It used to be that prominent scientists would gather up their scattered papers and unify them into a magnum opus laying out their theories, or possibly a few different books, one on each major area they worked on. That sometimes happens, especially in areas like cosmology, but it's much less the norm than it was 100 years ago. Today it's quite common to just publish 200+ papers over your career and not really do any summarization of them, even though there is plenty that could often be done, since it's common for papers to supersede or overlap with previous ones.

Actually, on that front, it'd be a big win if scientists with lots of publications simply provided some sort of brief guide to them. Take the 50 papers on lasers, and provide an annotated bibliography explaining which papers are the important ones, which papers are obsolete or superseded, and which ones might be of particular interest to people working on particular topics. A few people do that, but many don't even separate their list of publications by topic, let alone provide a guide.

Or, shorter: There is a lot of stuff published, but it's terribly indexed and summarized, which I think is a bigger problem than the volume alone.

Re: Thomas Jefferson's Letter to His Nephew Peter

#25
post #15
post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"If you pay peanuts, you get monkeys."

Agreed 100% (it's not my choice.)

You have my sympathy. (Two years managing an outsourcing operation in India working from specs Bablefished from Japanese. And being told by my Indians that my translations were wrong because Babelfish, Yahoo, and Google outvoted me. And having to justify to management why I was billing months of overtime to debugging in a project where a math error would be national news and where RC1 was delivered in a state where it was literally impossible to pass your test unless you were deaf...)

Re: Thomas Jefferson's Letter to His Nephew Peter

#26
post #2

It's amazing how much the wonders of technology and readily accessible information have screwed up the value many children in the past 3ish generations (my marker for the beginning of the decline is WWII reconstruction). A "renaissance man" now is a dilettante. In Jefferson's day it meant having both broad and deep knowledge. One could argue that the advances of science have made this impossible in modern times but I…

"Fortunately, literacy, though it consumes its own oral antecedants and, unless it is carefully monitored, even destroys their memory, is also infinitely adaptable. It can restore their memory, too." Ong, Walter J.. Orality and Literacy. New York: Routledge, 2003: 15.

We need not limit our knowledge and view of the world to what fits in our brain. We do, however, need to make sure that what we are putting into our brain is useful to ourselves and to humanity; Up-Up-Down-Down-Left-Right-Left-Right-B-A-Start.

Re: Thomas Jefferson's Letter to His Nephew Peter

#27
post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>long-relaxing-walks-while-hunting kind yep. bird hunting i think.

Yeah this used to be pretty common, especially for schoolchildren for at least 100 years after Jefferson's time to "walk" home while hunting.

Crazy. To what end, food on the table ?

This would also imply the children took guns to school. Am I the only one who finds this rather insane ? Also, if you happen to have any links on the matter I'd appreciate it.

Re: Thomas Jefferson's Letter to His Nephew Peter

#28
post #4

Awesome read, though Jefferson seems to have suffered from the "these are facts because I said so" type of thinking. Here are some relevant quotes: "Sitting up late at night is injurious to the health, and not useful to the mind." "Games played with the ball, and others of that nature, are too violent for the body, and stamp no character on the mind." "As to the species of exercise, I advise the gun. [snip] Let your…

"Aside from that, I'm curious how much of the reading list will be doable these days without a solid grasp of Greek or Latin or French ?" A whole hell of a lot. You could probably download better than 90% from gutenberg.org, though I am not qualified to say how good or bad the translations are. If you want paper, your local Borders probably has 40 percent or more on its shelves. At least, they always seem to have abo…

A university library will probably have all those things on their shelves, if you have access to one.

Re: Thomas Jefferson's Letter to His Nephew Peter

#29
post #2

It's amazing how much the wonders of technology and readily accessible information have screwed up the value many children in the past 3ish generations (my marker for the beginning of the decline is WWII reconstruction). A "renaissance man" now is a dilettante. In Jefferson's day it meant having both broad and deep knowledge. One could argue that the advances of science have made this impossible in modern times but I…

>"renaissance man" now is a dilettante. In Jefferson's day it meant having both broad and deep knowledge.

Jefferson's estimated net worth is $212 million. George Washington's is $525 million. It seems like you are comparing the values of a notably intelligent and published subset of the upper 1% aristocratic crust subset of society to the general population today. Hardly a fair comparison.

You are railing against people for being dumb and yet have really bad proposals as to the cause. "It's the schools fault, let's do away with schools" "It's the kids' VALUES"

You fail to consider that:

1. Intelligence is a distribution. There have always been dumb people and there always will be.

2. Economics. Blacks used to score significantly lower on IQ tests than whites in America. But guess what, the gap was directly proportional to the gap in poverty rate (http://www.huppi.com/kangaroo/L-IQgapgenetic.htm). As the economic status of blacks in America improved the gap has decreased.

If you want to compare the intelligence of groups of people large enough to account for outliers, the difference is always largely socioeconomic. Thus I will argue the OPPOSITE of your hypothesis is true:

The wonders of technology and readily accessible information are the most important factor driving down global poverty, resulting in a higher percentage of the global population fulfilling a "Jeffersonian" ideal of the renaissance man with deep knowledge, whereas it was the time and opportunities and books to achieve that level of study was before confined to the aristocracy.

Re: Thomas Jefferson's Letter to His Nephew Peter

#30

Give up money, give up fame, give up science, give the earth itself and all it contains, rather than do an immoral act. And never suppose, that in any possible situation, or under any circumstances, it is best for you to do a dishonorable thing, however slightly so it may appear to you. Whenever you are to do a thing, though it can never be known but to yourself, ask yourself how you would act were all the world look…

http://lesswrong.com/lw/jb/applause_lights/ It's possible to do nuanced analysis of that era, Jefferson's beliefs, his treatment of his slaves relative to other slaveowners, the fact that he freed them on his death, and the things he wrote about in his letters to contemporaries - if you read his letters, he constantly questioned slavery and had misgivings about it, but it was the norm for the era. You could make inte…

I take your point and agree my post doesn't add much to the discussion and understand why it's voted down. But I disagree that any of the points you mention in your first paragraph help the case that Jefferson was not an utter hypocrite when it comes to notions of Liberty or Self-Reliance. And that was the point I was trying to convey.
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