
I am very real - etrain
http://www.lettersofnote.com/2012/03/i-am-very-real.html
======
reason
This submission could not have come at a better time.

Over the past couple of weeks, I've been contemplating making a submission
urging HNers to be _human_ , and to recognize that everyone else who comments
here is also a _human_ , and that stories about startups and notable figures
are essentially about _humans_ \- humans who all have families, friends,
ambitions, desires, flaws, struggles.

All too often I see people here forgetting about that. I myself have been
guilty of it in the past too. But there's something about the negativity and
criticism here that grates on me more than on other sites. I think people here
tend to assume that being an engineer/programmer means that not only must they
treat their code with utmost logic and rationality, but that they should look
at life in the same manner - that to be an empathetic and emotional person
puts them at some sort of optimizational and productive disadvantage. All that
leads to is cold, harsh discourse and criticism without considering the more
abstract, but very real ways humans feel and behave. It's sad to see.

So, I guess this is that submission. Next time you write a comment, ask
yourself if you're being human and remind yourself that whatever you're about
to say is directed at another human.

Stop being robots, and just act human.

~~~
andywood
I agree with you, and there is a specific type of pedantry I find especially
grating. I'm talking about the constant insistence on citations and double-
blind studies, even when it isn't appropriate - even when someone obviously
means only to share their own experience. There's an aggressive form
("Citation Needed") and a passive-aggressive form ("Say, friend, that's a bold
claim! I sure am interested in this. Do you have a source where I might read
more about it?")

Sometimes, this is completely appropriate, as when someone is using an
anecdote as their only support in a vigorous debate, or when information is
clearly being presented as factual, when it probably isn't. But as "Citation
Needed" has become a rampant meme in its own right, I think it is increasingly
applied in knee-jerk, cargo-cultish, and inappropriate ways.

Sharing anecdotes and experiences is one of the fundamental ways that humans
share information about the myriad little nooks of the world that we move
through. I know it isn't science. I'm quite well read on cognitive biases,
statistics, and the scientific method; and I do not need to be reminded about
these by HN commenters continually, every time somebody shares a story, or an
opinion based on their experience.

I'm concerned about a chilling effect on the sharing of anecdotal information.
There is information - information that I can use - in the many experiences
related by others. I don't need or desire to get fully 100% of my information
from peer-reviewed scientific studies. I know the difference between science
and personal experience, and I would much rather bear the burden of telling
the difference for myself, as the reader, than to have fewer people talking
about their personal experiences.

~~~
kalid
Thanks for eloquently stating a problem I've noticed for a while. I think
there's a fear of not coming off as a hard-nosed, logical thinker, so the
constant need for citation is a proxy for "I believed XYZ because some
authority said it was true. If I'm wrong, it's not me, it's because I was
mislead."

The world is full of single data points. If you see an anecdote, see it as a
data point, but more importantly, see it as a metaphor which could apply to
your situation.

Sometimes I think some people wouldn't hug their kids until a study said it
was ok (hrm, weren't there studies in the 50s saying you should do the
opposite?). I'd like to think I'm rational, but sometimes you need to move
beyond the cover-your-ass safety net of "the study says" and do what feels
right. Citation? Here's a meta-study that most medical research studies are
false (<http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1182327/>).

~~~
route66
Erik Naggum had a flamy comment on that topic:
[http://groups.google.com/group/comp.lang.lisp/msg/e5af8ef3f8...](http://groups.google.com/group/comp.lang.lisp/msg/e5af8ef3f88dd39c?dmode=source&output=gplain&pli=1)

The study you mention brings me to another point: In some cases the discussion
here on HN revolves about believe systems, papers an references cited are
often selected for an argument by authority. Moreover: would a paper in itself
be enough? wouldn't you have to, critically follow through to the reviewing
peers? concurring papers? This is indeed death of any discussion and it proves
nothing in the end.

Typical thread of citations against citations:
<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3749114> but the debate is never coming
beyond the point of "how do yo know this?" questions, masking "I don't like
your point" as "you have no data backing this up".

~~~
kalid
Exactly. I saw that back and forth thread on education and it made me cringe.

------
sosuke
While not nearly as important, the idea that authors are real makes me
immediately relate to my own experience that customers don't seem to
understand that software is made by real people too. People with feelings, who
are fallible. Several comments on blogs or reviews on the app store show to me
that people don't feel they are being insulting or rude if they aren't facing
the person they criticize. The more I wrote this comment the more I started to
seem the Internet as a whole falling victim to anonymous words that cut deep.
We've had to develop unnaturally thick skin.

~~~
essayist
David Foster Wallace's take on this was that my own reality is so
overpoweringly real, that it's hard to see you (or anyone else) as real.

 __ _everything in my own immediate experience supports my deep belief that I
am the absolute centre of the universe, the realest, most vivid and important
person in existence. We rarely talk about this sort of natural, basic self-
centredness, because it's so socially repulsive.... Other people's thoughts
and feelings have to be communicated to you somehow, but your own are so
immediate, urgent, real...._ __

The remedy he proposed:

 __ _[Instead:] if you're aware enough to give yourself a choice, you can
choose to look differently at this fat, dead-eyed, over-made-up lady who just
screamed at her little child in the checkout line - maybe she's not usually
like this; maybe she's been up three straight nights holding the hand of her
husband who's dying of bone cancer, or maybe this very lady is the low-wage
clerk at the Motor Vehicles Dept who just yesterday helped your spouse resolve
a nightmarish red-tape problem through some small act of bureaucratic
kindness. Of course, none of this is likely, but it's also not impossible - it
just depends on what you want to consider._ __

[http://m.guardian.co.uk/books/2008/sep/20/fiction?cat=books&...](http://m.guardian.co.uk/books/2008/sep/20/fiction?cat=books&type=article)

What works for me sometimes in dealing with customer-service folk is to ask
them what they would do in my position.

~~~
partisan
While I agree with your suggestion for dealing with Customer Service, I don't
agree with Mr. Wallace's proposed remedy. Why should I have to imagine someone
in a piteous position in order to be able to empathize with them? Can't we
just accept people for who they are and empathize because they are just like
us?

~~~
didgeoridoo
You might as well ask, "why can't we just make ourselves smarter?" Our brains
don't always work in the way we want them to work; what's wrong with proposing
a brain hack that results in a desired emotional output?

Wallace's hack is particularly cool because it uses the prefrontal cortex
(over which you have at least some level of conscious control) to create
stories that trick your limbic brain into generating the preferred emotional
response.

I've seen this referred to as "riding an elephant", because the "rider" (the
conscious mind) can skillfully manipulate the "elephant" (the bulk of the
brain), but ultimately remains at the larger creature's mercy. Great image.

~~~
kalid
Thanks for that explanation. I've seen the "riding the elephant" analogy
before and it's quite fitting. Usually the rider can't do much, but this trick
seems to work.

------
phren0logy
My favorite part:

>Perhaps you will learn from this that books are sacred to free men for very
good reasons, and that wars have been fought against nations which hate books
and burn them. If you are an American, you must allow all ideas to circulate
freely in your community, not merely your own.

Thanks again, Vonnegut.

~~~
trentfowler
>But it is also true that if you exercise that right and fulfill that
responsibility in an ignorant, harsh, un-American manner, then people are
entitled to call you bad citizens and fools. Even your own children are
entitled to call you that.

I might have gasped out loud.

------
renegadedev
Burning a book (good or bad) is the lowest form of expression humans can stoop
to. If people understood the fact that a book is simply a personification of
ideas, and ideas good or bad, cannot perish in a fire, the will realize the
folly of engaging in a futile act like burning a book.

One of the inevitable consequences of the digital revolution will be that,
there will come a time, when a controversial book will be published
exclusively in digital format with no physical copies to burn. I don't know if
this necessarily good or bad, but the fact that idiots can't burn a book will
provide me some amount of pleasure.

~~~
WiseWeasel
I'm not so sure that this type of book-burning is tied to the physicality of
books, rather than a symbol of rejection. Certainly, there have been instances
throughout history, such as when the Nazi government or the Catholic Church
have carried out organized purges of particular written works on a societal
level, where the supply of the work has been materially impacted to the point
that it is difficult to obtain.

But I assume you're referring more to examples such as this story, of small
groups using book-burning as a publicity stunt, or a public symbol of their
rejection of the work. In those cases, I doubt the lack of physicality makes
any difference; if they wanted to protest a digital-only book, they'd simply
print it out on something flammable first.

~~~
renegadedev
Good point. I was not necessarily referring to the physicality of books but
the notion these book-burners subscribe to, that if they symbolically burn a
book, the idea will perish. Your point of the Nazis burning the books out of
supply only illustrates the point that to burn a book in the hope that the
idea will perish, did not necessarily work.

------
silentscope
"And no copies of this letter have been sent to anybody else. You now hold the
only copy in your hands. It is a strictly private letter from me to the people
of Drake..."

What happened?

~~~
vajrabum
I'm guessing like most people who write for a living that he had a carbon
(assuming this is before word processing) or a disk file found in his papers
after his death.

------
leejoramo
For some more background, the local newspaper looks back on this story 35
years later:

[http://www.minotdailynews.com/page/content.detail/id/519549....](http://www.minotdailynews.com/page/content.detail/id/519549.html?nav=5576)

------
peterwwillis
Is there even any logical basis for the idea that banning curse words or
otherwise offensive language "protects" children?

The word itself causes no harm. Tell a child a curse word they don't know and
they aren't stricken back as if you had slapped them. It has no meaning or
value until you describe what it means and when to use it. Then once it's
explained to them, assuming they weren't harangued by their parents into
fearing the word itself, there's the use in a book such as The Adventures of
Huckleberry Finn:

 _"Oh, yes, this is a wonderful govment, wonderful. Why, looky here. There was
a free nigger there from Ohio – a mulatter, most as white as a white man. He
had the whitest shirt on you ever see..."_

Contrast this with a book like Where The Red Fern Grows, where a boy's dog
(who he loves dearly) is disemboweled in front of him and he has to literally
stuff his intestines back into the dog's bloody carcass.

If the high purpose is indeed to protect children they should be taught about
the world so they'll know how to deal with it. Sure, there's ugly things about
the world and for the most part we try to isolate ourselves from it, but
burning it doesn't make it go away. The end result may be it enforces in the
child the idea that they can choose to destroy any part of society they
dislike, regardless of anyone else's opinion and without a reason other than
their feelings. Personally I can't think of anything more frightening.

~~~
Daniel_Newby
The moral purity police are always with us and always find some excuse to save
other people from damnation: witch hunting, regulating the surface area of
women's clothing, statutory rape, and so forth.

------
jsharpe
I'm curious, how, if "... no copies of this letter have been sent to anybody
else. You now hold the only copy in your hands." is true, how is it reproduced
on this site?

~~~
sheepthief
Shaun here - I run Letters of Note.

Presumably Vonnegut kept the draft, or kept the original and sent McCarthy the
one copy. The letter's text was later included in Vonnegut's book, Palm
Sunday, as mentioned on the site.

~~~
dasht
As an aside: thank you for the great web site.

~~~
sheepthief
Thank you. It's a pleasure.

~~~
rusua
Your site always makes my day. Keep the good work!

------
hugs
Every time I read a story like this, I'm reminded of Dunbar's number and David
Wong's excellent (and very funny) summary:
<http://www.cracked.com/article_14990_what-monkeysphere.html>

The "Monkeysphere" explains a huge amount of silly human behavior.

~~~
thebrokencube
Thank you for sharing this link, this actually helps explain a lot of stuff
I've been wondering about for a while.

~~~
hugs
Yeah, my description of the Monkeysphere is: "The Universal Theory of Human
Behavior". I wish more people knew about it. Just doing my part. :-)

------
alanfalcon
I've been obsessing a little bit over Ready Player One over the past couple
weeks. Not that it is an amazing piece of literature, it surely is not that.
But it is highly entertaining and an incredible work of meta fiction. It is a
fiction about a fictional world in which essentially all other fictional
worlds co-exist, and they all celebrate each other. I would recommend it to
anybody at all without reservation (if you don't read speculative fiction
you'll just ignore my recommendation anyway, even though I think this book
would have the power to open some doors to you).

I have not read Kurt Vonnegut, but was intrigued by the specific reference to
him as the main character's favorite author, a certain kind of twisted high
praise in the context of the book as a whole. I have not heard much about Kurt
Vonnegut beyond recognizing the name and the Ready Player One reference. But
reading this letter, and with the added bonus of the implied recommendation
from Ernest Cline, I've heard enough.

Where's the best place to start?

~~~
drewblaisdell
Slaugherhouse-Five is his best-known book, and was the book referenced in the
article. I would say to start there.

Here are the grades Vonnegut himself gave his own books (in Palm Sunday):

Slaughterhouse-Five: A+

Cat’s Cradle: A+

The Sirens of Titan: A

Mother Night: A

God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater: A

Jailbird: A

Player Piano: B

Welcome to the Monkeyhouse: B-

Breakfast of Champions: C

Wampeters, Foma and Granfalloons: C

Palm Sunday: C

Slapstick: D

Happy Birthday, Wanda June: D

------
ilamont
I was curious how this document was released, if only one copy was distributed
to a person who was probably not inclined to share it. The first newspaper
reference on Google I could find is dated June 1982.

[http://news.google.com/newspapers?id=L6pNAAAAIBAJ&sjid=r...](http://news.google.com/newspapers?id=L6pNAAAAIBAJ&sjid=rfsDAAAAIBAJ&pg=2734,3598967&);

Anyone have access to Factiva or LexisNexis?

~~~
sheepthief
Vonnegut himself released it, in his book, Palm Sunday.

~~~
Tyrannosaurs
But in the letter he claims that the copy the recipient is holding is the only
copy. Was he lying or did he somehow have it returned to him?

~~~
orblivion
Looks like this letter is 1973, the book 1981. His ultimate point is that he
wasn't exploiting the letter for attention. 8 years after the incident, I
think it's safe to claim the potential for exploitation is gone.

EDIT: Oh, you mean you took him literally, that he didn't even have his own
copy. Well:

"And no copies of this letter have been sent to anybody else. You now hold the
only copy in your hands."

It sounds like this could imply that he could be holding onto a copy himself.
Interesting point, why would you do that if you didn't mean to exploit it, at
least eventually? Or maybe he just likes to hold on to things for records.

~~~
vollmond
I know personally I keep copies of every letter I send, simply to refer back
to if and when the recipient responds to me; it's useful to know what
questions I asked when the answers come in.

~~~
Tyrannosaurs
That's a lot easier now than it was back then. Maybe he used carbon paper but
there was no photocopying and obviously no word processing, at least nothing
that an individual outside of a specialist organisation would have access to.

It's obviously the most likely explanation but still, it perhaps stretches
what might be considered usual for the period.

------
fabricode
Everyone seems to be confused by the "I am sending you the only copy" aspect
of this letter. I'm sure he kept excellent records, and keeping a copy (or the
original) for himself would be a standard business practice for someone in the
communication business.

It is no different than you sending an email to someone saying, "I'm sending
this note to you alone rather than posting this publicly, ..."

As for why he would keep a copy: no different than why you keep copies of your
emails. Should the recipient respond, he'll have his original to reference if
the person responding takes items out of context, attributes statements not
actually made to Vonnegut, amongst other benign or nefarious mistakes.

------
bambax
This is very weak. We should not burn books because it might hurt the feelings
of authors? Surely that means it's ok to burn the books of dead authors?

The reason why we should not burn books is because

\- it deprives potential readers of the benefit of reading them

\- the free circulation of ideas is the cornerstone of a free society, and
trying to restrict it is the beginning of tyranny

\- arguments should be fought with arguments, not fire

But the feelings of authors really don't have anything to do with it. KV
shouldn't have felt insulted that someone burnt his books. He should have been
ashamed for the human race that anyone would burn any book (and not just his
own). He should have punched the guy in the face.

~~~
kaeluka
this letter is a very good example of tailoring an argument to the audience.

------
glennericksen
Do people burn books online? Is there a correlative action to tossing vilified
literature in the fire? The attitude characterized by McCarthy's response to
Slaughterhouse-Five retreats from reality to the ideal. As media channels have
diversified and the input streams exponentially increased, can I burn
something by choosing not to consume it? Obviously we cannot take in
everything, but I think the filter bubble, both imposed and self-manufactured,
creates a sort of insularity and a disconnection from the broader human
experience. If I only read what I like or relate to, it makes me less real.

~~~
listic
Good question.

I think there's no similar action analogous to burning books online, so people
inclined to do so are left to other kinds of action, like writing angry
comments and blog posts.

------
padobson
This is exactly why the 6th Amendment of the US Constitution guarantees the
right to face your accuser.

"in all criminal prosecutions, the accused shall enjoy the right…to be
confronted with the witnesses against him"

It's harder to accuse someone, or even insult or disparage them, when you have
to face them. And that is something that should be hard to do.

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Confrontation_Clause>

------
delinka
I am curious for more. Does the source book have more on this story? I'd like
to know whether the letter was ever shared in the community.

~~~
phireal
It must have been shared with at least one other person as it explicitly
states that there is only a single copy in existence. For us to be reading it
means either the recipient or the person they shared it with subsequently
shared it with others.

~~~
maxko87
"Copy" probably doesn't refer to an actual copy, outside of the one Vonnegut
probably made for himself -- it refers to the one sent.

~~~
Tipzntrix
Still rather deceitful of Mr. Vonnegut.

~~~
wiggitty
hmmm

------
abruzzi
To me the key sentence is:

>You should also resolve to expose your children to all sorts of opinions and
information, in order that they will be better equipped to make decisions and
to survive.

A great way of saying that if you don't learn on your own to discern good from
bad, you will never learn to do it, and learning requires exposure to all
sides.

------
marajit
"If you are an American, you must allow all ideas to circulate freely in your
community, not merely your own."

Tell me you don't buy this?

------
allenbrunson
_And no copies of this letter have been sent to anybody else. You now hold the
only copy in your hands._

ahem.

------
kaeluka
I still can not believe how awesome this man was. This is exactly how all
people should be.

------
soitgoes
I wonder what the school board would have done with Fahrenheit 451.

------
kanetrain
This was an amazing letter. Great lesson for me on so many levels.

------
MyNewAccount
isn't government actually run by people too?

------
ktizo
_Everything was beautiful and nothing hurt._

I was depressed for weeks when he died.

------
username3
_If you are an American, you must allow all ideas to circulate freely in your
community, not merely your own._

If Kurt is an American, Kurt must allow book burning.

If you are an American, you must not down vote.

~~~
hythloday
I guess you stopped reading at that point, because he goes on to say:

 _After I have said all this, I am sure you are still ready to respond, in
effect, “Yes, yes–but it still remains our right and our responsibility to
decide what books our children are going to be made to read in our community.”
This is surely so. But it is also true that if you exercise that right and
fulfill that responsibility in an ignorant, harsh, un-American manner, then
people are entitled to call you bad citizens and fools. Even your own children
are entitled to call you that._

