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The Need to Read

paulgraham.com

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Re: The Need to Read

#71

Post by camillomiller »

yourgranny wrote: post #70

Since this is a Paul Graham post, I'm gonna ask because it is the elephant in the room. Why has Hacker News been so quiet about Twitter? I think I know but I want my suspicions confirmed. I would prefer politics be kept out of Hacker News completely but the stories that don't appear seemingly lean in a single direction and it is turning me away now.

I have noticed the same, and I would have the same question.

I don't wanna think that it's because it's mostly a community of (male) Musk-Jack-SamAltman simps and wannabes that are just a good startup idea away from being billionaire themselves. A good, well elaborated answer, might help me to steer away from this conclusion.

Re: The Need to Read

#72

Post by syliconadder »

personjerry wrote: post #26

It's interesting that the article's thesis is about reading, but most of the article is actually about writing . And I think that's an understated point. I myself wrote a blog piece about "Blogging as Structured Thinking" earlier this year. I think that actually plenty of people do reading in various forms of content. The real challenge is getting people to do more writing. If you want to be a thinker, you have to wr…

I think this level of kindness makes it easy for people to feel okay expressing themselves. Thank you for this beautiful message.

Re: The Need to Read

#73

Post by ramblerman »

yourgranny wrote: post #70

Since this is a Paul Graham post, I'm gonna ask because it is the elephant in the room. Why has Hacker News been so quiet about Twitter? I think I know but I want my suspicions confirmed. I would prefer politics be kept out of Hacker News completely but the stories that don't appear seemingly lean in a single direction and it is turning me away now.

> I would prefer politics be kept out of Hacker News completely

your post achieves the exact opposite.

--

Either way it's pretty bad etiquette to hijack a thread for some completely different purpose. Don't let the inevitability of your your post getting flagged further your conspiracy narrative.

Re: The Need to Read

#74

Post by Kaibeezy »

I suspect the author is making a good point, but it is far from adequately supported. Merely an assertion of opinion, not a even really a fleshed-out essay.

Here’s the real shit, scariest thing I’ve ever read:

The Erosion of Deep Literacy, Adam Garfinkle, National Affairs, 2020

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25311662

Re: The Need to Read

#75

Post by [deleted] »

yourgranny wrote: post #70

Since this is a Paul Graham post, I'm gonna ask because it is the elephant in the room. Why has Hacker News been so quiet about Twitter? I think I know but I want my suspicions confirmed. I would prefer politics be kept out of Hacker News completely but the stories that don't appear seemingly lean in a single direction and it is turning me away now.

[deleted]

Re: The Need to Read

#76

Post by imgabe »

yourgranny wrote: post #70

Since this is a Paul Graham post, I'm gonna ask because it is the elephant in the room. Why has Hacker News been so quiet about Twitter? I think I know but I want my suspicions confirmed. I would prefer politics be kept out of Hacker News completely but the stories that don't appear seemingly lean in a single direction and it is turning me away now.

You’re free to submit stories and say whatever you want. It should be pretty clear why nobody is talking about Twitter on a completely unrelated thread.

Re: The Need to Read

#77

Post by eatonphil »

Every time I write something I intend to be permanent I reread what I've written multiple times out loud. I find complicated sentences, or related phrases that are unnecessarily far apart, or words that I'd never use in speech. Then I make modifications to minimize these.

So even aside from reading what others write, I think you can only write well yourself if you assiduously read what you write.

Re: The Need to Read

#78

Post by Kaibeezy »

npunt wrote: post #13

There’s much more to the story than writing is a way of thinking, and reading is a big input into writing. Specifically, how each interplay with ideas, as most of us after all are in the business of creating things. And here, the most important bit is not reading, its curiosity. Curiosity about others’ ideas drives reading, curiosity about one’s own ideas drives writing. The time we spend chasing each type of curiosi…

Wild guess… Schopenhauer, Einstein, et al, were referring to their peers and associates, many sigmas out on the curve. I’m imagining a sensor of the larger sample reaching the “reading limit”; it would make a neutrino detector look like fireworks at a disco.

Re: The Need to Read

#79

Post by iillexial »

Kaibeezy wrote: post #74

I suspect the author is making a good point, but it is far from adequately supported. Merely an assertion of opinion, not a even really a fleshed-out essay. Here’s the real shit, scariest thing I’ve ever read: The Erosion of Deep Literacy , Adam Garfinkle, National Affairs, 2020 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25311662

The first comment in your link says basically the same what you have said:

>This article makes far reaching societal claims with essentially no evidence.

and

>I suspect the author is making a good point, but it is far from adequately supported

Re: The Need to Read

#80

Post by matthewmacleod »

yourgranny wrote: post #70

Since this is a Paul Graham post, I'm gonna ask because it is the elephant in the room. Why has Hacker News been so quiet about Twitter? I think I know but I want my suspicions confirmed. I would prefer politics be kept out of Hacker News completely but the stories that don't appear seemingly lean in a single direction and it is turning me away now.

I was a bit surprised myself, but after thinking about it - the discussions under the Twitter stories that I’ve seen on the front page have mostly rapidly deteriorated to the point of being pretty unedifying for everyone.

That’s not surprising, since it’s a story that meets at the intersection of tech, business, politics, and controversial public figures. There are quite a lot of strong views on it, and in my experience this community doesn’t tend to deal in a particularly adult way with events like that.

That kind of discussion usually sinks pretty quickly - I assume mostly because of the algorithm down-ranking overheated discussions. Then you have the general leaning of HN towards a bit of a libertarian, counter-mainstream narrative - it’s not hard to see that the pattern you describe being a natural outcome of all that, no shadowy motives required.

It kinda sucks to be honest, because from many different perspectives it’s absolutely gigantic news with lots of really interesting stuff to think and talk about.

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