
Schopenhauer - On thinking for oneself - Arun2009
http://ebooks.adelaide.edu.au/s/schopenhauer/arthur/lit/chapter5.html
======
dpatru
This is a old argument for the modern practice of blogging. I've often been
confused as to the relative merits of reading versus writing. In reading, you
gain a lot of information quickly. In writing, you develop your own thinking.
Schopenhauer makes it clear that not only is writing vastly superior, but that
reading is potentially bad for you, because it encourages replacing active
(strenuous) thought with lazy listening.

Paul Graham's advice to "run uphill" is a generalization of this: the better
activities require more effort.

~~~
lolcraft
Most of the time, there's little thought involved in blogging. Writing does
not guarantee the writer has something to say: for sure I'm not the only one
to have read vacuous blogs the Internet would be better without (I'm thinking
of most twitters).

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anr
He also wrote this essay:

On Reading and Books -
[http://ebooks.adelaide.edu.au/s/schopenhauer/arthur/essays/c...](http://ebooks.adelaide.edu.au/s/schopenhauer/arthur/essays/chapter5.html)

in which he talks about "[those that] have read themselves stupid."

It's interesting that we can trace a parallel with technology: reading too
much but building too little.

~~~
pavs
Bookmarked. Will read it later. I have already read too much for today.

------
george_morgan
Schopenhauer also wrote some cracking stuff on women:
<http://www.heretical.com/miscella/onwomen.html>

~~~
omouse
I wonder how much of those ideas are merely a reflection of the society he
lived in rather than his own thoughts?

~~~
tdoggette
That's an excuse I'd accept for someone's everyday views: "eh, they probably
never thought about it and just went with society's default."

When a philosopher sits down and writes about their perspective on a topic,
it's a safe assumption that they thought about their conclusions before
publishing them.

~~~
omouse
I'm not sure that's a safe assumption. It seems to me that everyone has a weak
spot even if they _think_ they're thinking about it thoroughly. We're only
human after all.

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jodrellblank
What a load of very repetetive smug unjustified claims.

"""That is why all those who think for themselves come, at bottom, to much the
same conclusion"""

!

(Edit: It does change after a while. Press on past the chain of: People who
think are superior to people who read. People who think are superior to people
who read. People who think (e.g. me) are superior to people who read. People
who think (e.g. me) are superior to most people. I am superior to most people.
I am superior to most people).

~~~
yummyfajitas
To be fair, this is (eventually) true of any factual claim: all rational
Bayesians must agree given sufficient information, regardless of what their
priors were.

But you are right, this fact is more often invoked to justify smug in-group
monocultures.

~~~
jodrellblank
I just popped back to delete my comment, but since it has a reply now I will
leave it and ask another question I've been wondering about your Bayesian
remark:

Does that mean all Bayesian's are trying to be the same as each other? That
Bayesianism considers human individuality silly?

Because if all Bayesians must agree given sufficient information, then the
only things left to disagree on (potentially) are ideas which have no fixed
grounding in reality, such as whether Wilkie Wilkinson's writings show
colonial alienation - and maybe they would eventually agree if given enough
information on each other's mental states and histories.

So, is it pushing towards the idea that there is only one possible rational
superintelligent view?

~~~
GavinB
Given enough information, rational thinkers should come to the conclusions
about matters of fact.

Bayes says nothing about goals, however. Rational Bayesians can have
completely divergent goals, so becoming increasingly rational does not impinge
on "human individuality."

~~~
jodrellblank
If your goals are picked based on facts then you are subject to the idea that
rational thinkers will come to the same conclusions about matters of fact and
so when exposed to the same facts will come to the same goals.

If your goal was not picked rationally based on facts, you can't claim to be a
completely rational thinker.

So the only room for human individuality is the knowledge gap between us and
omniscient beings where we can pick goals arbitrarily, then pursue them as
rationally as our limited mental abilities allow.

?

~~~
camccann
Fundamental goals are neither rational nor irrational. A rational thinker with
no non-rational goals would have no reason to ever do anything--including
think at all.

Two perfectly rational agents with the same fundamental goals would, of
course, inevitably select the same sub-goals and actions to reach those goals.

But at some point if you keep asking a rational agent "but why do you want to
do _that_?" the only answer will be "because it is my nature."

~~~
adrih
Does this mean some form of mystery about oneself must always remain? Assume
complete self-referentiality of a being. Then the ultimate source of one's
goals is no longer the black box called "my nature". What is it then? And
would it be the same for two completely self-referential being?

(By self-referential I mean one who understands oneself absolutely; one who
possess a perfectly accurate map of oneself. There probably is a better word.)

~~~
sfwc
If the human brain functions more or less according to classical physics, with
causality running forwards in time, then "one's nature" is just a very
complicated function of the local state of the universe - the previous state
of one's brain (including the encoding of the consciousness function itself)
plus incoming sensory data.

More than once you've probably made a decision, at least in part, by
psychoanalyzing yourself (and maybe psychoanalyzing the way that you're
psychoanalyzing yourself) - so imagine being able to psychoanalyze yourself in
real time, with (near-)perfect accuracy. (There might be information-theoretic
problems with trying to simulate your whole brain inside of itself at speed.)

If one is the kind of person who has given serious thought to one's
motivations in life (which must include coming to the realization that they
are, in a certain fundamental sense, arbitrary) then I don't know that they
would necessarily change all that much under these conditions.

------
pmichaud
I JUST wrote a draft of an essay that says essentially what this says: Writing
is necessary to thinking, and reading doesn't cut it.

~~~
araneae
So... you've never composed an essay in your head without writing it down?

Writing may help you organize your thoughts, but it's not necessary.

~~~
mbrubeck
How many bugs do you find _before_ writing the code, compared to the number
you find after?

~~~
araneae
Are you saying you don't learn anything from thinking through how to write a
big piece of code before you write it?

The vast majority of bugs I find after writing the code are trivial.
Certainly, I learn something from writing it, but I find that if I just start
writing without thinking about it first, especially for larger projects, I
don't end up where I want to and have to scrap large pieces of it.

Writing helps you get the details straight, but thinking is essential for
designing the big picture.

------
pchickey
If you enjoy this, Transcendent Speculation on the Apparent Deliberateness in
the Fate of the Individual is another great essay by "the passionate and lucid
Schopenhauer" :
[http://books.google.com/books?id=aXFsb2UogOkC&pg=PA199&#...</a>

------
mark_l_watson
I find that some good books take a very long time for me to read because I
need to stop and mull over what I am reading. Case in point: I just finished a
short Joseph Campbell book ("Pathways to Bliss"): I would literally stop every
paragraph or two and reflect on how the material was relevant to my own life,
about my own 'myth,' etc. It took me a month to work through this short book.

------
wolfish
I've never read a book that didn't make me think for myself.

------
by
Transposed to programming I'll take this as saying "Don't use other people's
libraries, write your own, because you will understand them properly and they
will integrate better with your programs."

~~~
araneae
"And it will make you much less productive because you'll be spending all your
time redoing something someone's already done, probably better than you ever
could."

I mean, with that logic, you might as well write in assembly.

------
araneae
_Reading is nothing more than a substitute for thought of one’s own. It means
putting the mind into leading-strings._

Newton couldn't have invented classical mechanics without the ancient Greeks.
In order to think, you need something to think about; you need input. Some of
that input will be from watching apples fall off of trees. Some of it will be
from information gathered from other people, presented in books.

What rubbish.

~~~
mortehu
I think you missed this part:

"The really scientific thinker does the same thing as these illiterate
persons, but on a larger scale. Although he has need of much knowledge, and so
must read a great deal [...]"

------
lovskogen
A real kicker for getting my head out of Google Reader.

