

Thomas Jefferson's Letter to His Nephew Peter - najirama
http://avalon.law.yale.edu/18th_century/let31.asp

======
eitally
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 disagree. Regurgitating the fractured work of others isn't
intelligence. Applying this information as a tool to advance oneself and the
human good is the goal of education. Most children not only don't get this,
they aren't even being taught the basic building blocks.

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.

I have exactly the same problem recruiting programmers. Like many large
corporations we are primarily a Java & .Net shop and it is incredibly
disappointing when 50% of the candidates can barely do more than drag controls
out of the toolbox (<\--- slight exaggeration, but not too much. I hire mostly
in MX, BR, and IN and skilled folks are hard to come by. Ironically, this is
usually because the cream are already working in the US/EU or earning US/EU
pay in consulting gigs that are geography independent. Good for them.)

My apologies for the rant, but this struck a nerve.

~~~
btilly
_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 increased 10-fold every
50 years.

In Jefferson's day it was truly possible to learn what was known about all
fields of science, and keep up with them all. Your knowledge could be broad
and deep. But based on the sheer increase of volume, this soon became
impossible. Today there are over 100,000 journals devoted to scientific
research. Even if you read one page per second, every second, day and night,
you would not even be scratching the surface of what is being produced.

 _Regurgitating the fractured work of others isn't intelligence. Applying this
information as a tool to advance oneself and the human good is the goal of
education. Applying this information as a tool to advance oneself and the
human good is the goal of education._

This is a strong argument, but not necessarily for the point you are trying to
make. Your argument leads to the point that we don't want students to just
memorize random facts and regurgitate them. It does not lead to the point that
it is possible to have both deep and broad knowledge about all fields.

The challenge is that, thanks to the advances of science, today we both have
more subjects to learn about (the "broad" is broader) and we know about them
in more depth (the "deep" is deeper). This has made the ideal of having both
broad and deep knowledge much, much harder. Hard enough that most conclude it
is simply impossible.

~~~
_delirium
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.

~~~
btilly
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.)

------
slay2k
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 gun therefore be the constant companion of your walks. [snip] Walking is the best possible exercise."
    

That last one leaves me pondering what he's talking about, since he doesn't
appear to be referring to hunting, unless it's the long-relaxing-walks-while-
hunting kind..

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.

~~~
forensic
>long-relaxing-walks-while-hunting kind

yep. bird hunting i think.

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

~~~
slay2k
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.

~~~
kenij
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.

~~~
waterlesscloud
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.

~~~
slay2k
Thanks to all three of you for the insights.

It's amazing how strange something can appear when interpreted in a different
social or cultural context.

~~~
Andrewski
I for one find your (former) ignorance of the widespread nature of gunplay in
America strange. Were you raised in a bubble?

------
julius_geezer
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.

~~~
tmsh
He does say Plato's Socratic dialogues. The Republic, which he has problems
with (e.g.,
[http://www.capitalismmagazine.com/culture/philosophy/5393-Je...](http://www.capitalismmagazine.com/culture/philosophy/5393-Jefferson-
Plato.html) \-- 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).

------
jamesseda
I don't know who this guy thinks he is, but Learning French is waste of time.

~~~
loewenskind
wtf? Learning another language is never a waste of time. If nothing else, it
will help you learn your own language better.

~~~
pfedor
Learning another language requires so much time and effort that it is almost
always an effort misplaced unless the language is English.

Learning a language is a few years of hard work. I have a friend who is an
assistant professor in Germany and he's toying with an idea of learning
German, but he mentioned to me that he was wondering whether learning a
programming language, say C++, wouldn't be a better use of his time. To which
my answer was: By expanding the amount of effort required to learn to speak
German, you wouldn't be able to just learn C++; the comparable thing would be
to go from knowing nothing about programming, to knowing enough to be able to
land a job as a Software Engineer in any company in the Silicon Valley.

~~~
loewenskind
What a useless point of view. English wont always be the dominant language.
What will people like you do then?

Is everything a waste of time unless you can directly make money from it?
Learning a language teaches you so many things. Things about _your_ language,
gives you insight into other cultures, etc., etc.

~~~
pfedor
You have only this many five-years projects left to complete in this life. If
you really prefer learning a foreign language to learning quantum mechanics,
or computer programming, or how to play a piano, by all means don't let me
stop you.

~~~
loewenskind
You can do more than one at the same time. You can even learn more than one
language at the same time so long as they're not too close to each other.

------
jberryman
_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 looking at you, and act accordingly._

Talk to me when you set free the 600 humans that you own. Until then you can
fuck off to your castle on the hill and invent silly gadgets, and study plants
while your farm loses money every year until your death.

~~~
lionhearted
<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.

~~~
brudgers
Washington freed his slaves upon his death.

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

Including children.

~~~
Andrewski
That's terrible. Children weren't hardly worth anything at auction!

