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Thomas Jefferson's Letter to His Nephew Peter

avalon.law.yale.edu

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Re: Thomas Jefferson's Letter to His Nephew Peter

#31

Post by kenij »

slay2k wrote: post #27
simonsarris wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I have no links, but I can tell you what I heard from my grandfather. Basically, yes, they took guns to school. Everyone did. It wasn't considered abnormal at all. They never had any problems with school shootings either. I guess if everyone has a gun, you'd end up dead pretty fast if you tried to start anything. After school, they'd go hunting and try to shoot something for dinner that night. If they couldn't get anything, their family might go without dinner that night.

I believe he lived in a fairly rural area though. I assume things were different in the cities.

Re: Thomas Jefferson's Letter to His Nephew Peter

#32

Post by metamemetics »

shantanubala wrote: post #17
ryanwaggoner wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 Can you clarify the relationship of technology and readily accessible information to the downfall of societal values? I don't necessarily disagree with the conclusion, but I'm curious as to how you came up with that as a hypothesis for the cause.

I don't speak for him, but here's my opinion. Since most information is just a quick web search away, most people have no incentive to actually absorb that information. Since we are constantly overloaded with information (and we're always connected to those sources of information -- email, IM, SMS, the news, etc.), we have to be extremely selective about the stuff we actually absorb. In the process, we lose absorptio…

>Since most information is just a quick web search away, most people have no incentive to actually absorb that information.

it's a moot point. In the 1700's we wouldn't have had access to the information anyway. Or even the money, time, and opportunities like aristocracy such as Jefferson had to buy books from London and study the smaller amount of knowledge available then.

So rather than not having an incentive to absorb information X, we wouldn't have even known it existed! A large part of knowledge is knowing what you DON'T know. The truly dangerous individuals are idiots that think they know everything.

Hopefully the web is making people realize that there are a lot of things out there they DON'T know. Decreasing anti-intelluctialism, provincialism, and narrow-mindedness.

I would be ecstatic if more people got their news from the web than from television!

Re: Thomas Jefferson's Letter to His Nephew Peter

#33

Post by jberryman »

benihana wrote: post #21
jberryman wrote: post #20

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.

How about Jefferson's own ideals?

Re: Thomas Jefferson's Letter to His Nephew Peter

#34

Post by portman »

slay2k wrote: post #27
simonsarris wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

You would not find it insane if you had spent a lot of time in the southern USA.

For a "guns-in-school" story just Google "University of Virginia John Davis shot".

The TL;DR; is that on November 12, 1840, a rowdy bunch of college students were drinking and shooting (as usual), and rode up to a professor and shot him. While tragic, this eventually paved the way for really, really entertaining college admissions tours that often feature a full re-enactment of the scene.

Re: Thomas Jefferson's Letter to His Nephew Peter

#35

Post by kiba »

eitally wrote: 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…

>>I think this is the biggest incentive for the non-school movement, as well as the increase in other alternative [to governmental SOLs] programs. Those parents value an education for what it allows their children to contribute creatively, not just use the tools of others before them.

Apparently, you missed makerzine, maker faire, 3D printers, harry potter fanfiction, and hackaday.

You also did not get the memo that people are actually becoming smarter over time. It's the Flynn's Effect.

If you're going to whine about how the good old day are better, maybe you should show us some real evidence why this is actually so.

Re: Thomas Jefferson's Letter to His Nephew Peter

#36

Post by waterlesscloud »

kenij wrote: post #31
slay2k wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I have no links, but I can tell you what I heard from my grandfather. Basically, yes, they took guns to school. Everyone did. It wasn't considered abnormal at all. They never had any problems with school shootings either. I guess if everyone has a gun, you'd end up dead pretty fast if you tried to start anything. After school, they'd go hunting and try to shoot something for dinner that night. If they couldn't get an…

My high school in the suburban south in the 1980s, people had gunracks in their trucks, often with guns on them. They couldn't come inside the building, but the guns in trucks were considered culturally untouchable at the time.

Re: Thomas Jefferson's Letter to His Nephew Peter

#37

Post by brudgers »

lionhearted wrote: post #22
jberryman wrote: post #20

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…

Washington freed his slaves upon his death.

More than 100 of Jefferson's were auctioned off to pay debts.

Including children.

Re: Thomas Jefferson's Letter to His Nephew Peter

#38

Post by tmsh »

julius_geezer wrote: post #9

Plato! In his correspondence with Adams, they expend a great deal of abuse on Plato. Odd then, to find him commending the dialogues. Odd also to find such cold birds as Jefferson and Thoreau commending Anacreon. As for horses, face it, the Indians rode when it was convenient. It took the US a while to figure out that it was pointless to send infantry chasing after mounted tribes.

He does say Plato's Socratic dialogues. The Republic, which he has problems with (e.g., http://www.capitalismmagazine.com/culture/philosophy/5393-Je... -- thanks for mentioning that correspondence -- had no idea, quite fascinating) we of course associate with the beginning of the end of Plato's Socratic dialogues -- even if he uses Socrates as a mouthpiece there and later. It's curious that Jefferson might've already understood those differences (he's also right about, e.g., 'Cicero's philosophies' as opposed to the guy's five billion other letters, speeches, commentaries, etc.). But then again Jefferson was sort of a baller (walk around and shoot things for exercise? I'm not a huge fan of guns or, frankly, Jefferson -- on account of his 400 slaves, etc. -- but if there was a baller in that century, it was probably him).

Re: Thomas Jefferson's Letter to His Nephew Peter

#39

Post by someperson »

w1ntermute wrote: post #12
slay2k wrote: 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 ? I kind of wanna give it a shot. No doubt it's all been translated (and is probably available for free online).

"...reading every thing in the original and not in translations"

Re: Thomas Jefferson's Letter to His Nephew Peter

#40

Post by btilly »

_delirium wrote: post #24
btilly wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 tut…

I strongly agree with this point. See http://bentilly.blogspot.com/2009/11/why-i-left-math.html for how what I saw in math supports your point.

Worse yet, we have not just specialized, we have lost knowledge as well. My favorite example of this is a result I rediscovered. Every mathematician knows that, for instance, sqrt(2)+cube_root(3) must be the root of some polynomial of degree 6. (This one turns out to be x^6 - 6x^4 -6x^3 + 12x^2 - 36x + 1.) I came up with a construction for answering questions like this. I showed it to a number of mathematicians, and none had seen it until I showed an older one who said, "That looks like a very old way to do this. Go to the library, pick up an algebra book from the 1800s, and see if you find it."

I did, it was there, and it turns out that two of the mathematicians I had talked to were in fields that had gotten their start from the very construction I rediscovered! (One was in number theory, dealing with things like algebraic integers. The other was in combinatorics, and did a lot of stuff with symmetric polynomials.)

If you're curious, the observation behind the construction is that any polynomial expression that is symmetric in the roots of a polynomial can be rewritten as a polynomial in the coefficients of that polynomial. So if a1 and a2 are the roots of x^2-2, and b1, b2, b3 are the roots of x^3-3, then (x-a1-b1)(x-a1-b2)(x-a1-b3)(x-a2-b1)(x-a2-b2)(x-a2-b3) is a polynomial in x and the coefficients of x^2-2 and x^3-3, which means that it is an integer polynomial.

All that said, this point doesn't support your argument. It is true that if information were better presented, people could learn more about more subjects than they could otherwise. It is true that trying to do this would have tremendous value. But if you want to learn about multiple subjects then you need to deal with how information actually exists out there in the world, rather than how we'd like it to be organized. The disorganization that you point to is a significant barrier to learning. (This problem does not look like it will improve any time soon.)

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