
New Da Vinci bio portrays a man obsessed with knowledge, impossible to know - ehudla
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2017/10/16/the-secret-lives-of-leonardo-da-vinci
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rdslw
This article is a (one of many) in recent time due to promotion of new book:
[https://www.amazon.com/Leonardo-Vinci-Walter-
Isaacson/dp/150...](https://www.amazon.com/Leonardo-Vinci-Walter-
Isaacson/dp/1501139150)

Not to deny Leonardo's might, but quite similar to the pattern of (e.g.) more
Depeche Mode songs on the radio signals new album/tour.

~~~
acdanger
Yes. And it's a fact mentioned right in the first sentence. So what?

~~~
rdslw
It's not.

There is nowhere stated: reason for this article is to promote the book sale.

Knowing true reason/motivtion of somebody's actions is important. You can also
draw conclusions if somebody is hiding their true motivation under pretext.

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drannex
The book was published yesterday, and I just got it this morning.

I just got finished with the first 150 pages, and this book is amazingly great
at conveying how obsessed with knowledge he had while dissecting all of his
works. Highly recommend everyone to read it.

------
iaw
There is no way that men like Da Vinci and Newton were easy to be around, they
were so beyond the norm in intelligence that they probably came off as
abrasive and severely arrogant.

~~~
fao_
I have grown up surrounded by two people with extraordinarily high IQs, and
they were normal people. They have more curiosity than normal people, and they
have lots of interests that span many, many subjects, but for all intents and
purposes they are normal in manner and demeanor.

This fashion for conflating intelligence (of all kinds) and egotism is utterly
beyond me.

~~~
navigator01
Agreed. If you're really smart and a prick, well, then you're just a really
smart prick. Intelligence and emotional mastery are divorced from one another.

~~~
erasmuse
Intelligence and creativity are also divorced from one another. Unlike Newton,
da Vinci, Einstein, most intelligent people aren't creative in the cultural
sense. Their creativity is rather directed towards fitting in more effectively
and being more social than the norm. Which in extreme cases looks like
multiple personality disorder, i.e. changing one's responses according to
context, the opposite of integrity, including the intellectual integrity
required to create new stuff.

~~~
fao_
> most intelligent people aren't creative in the cultural sense

I would beg to differ. Most of the people I know of high intelligence seem to
be a jack-of-all-trades, with almost all of them having, if not a _heavy_ love
of language, a decent dollop of it.

Ultimately, there is art and creativity in everything, you just need to know
where to find it. The type of creativity that creates a stunning artistic
composition is the same sort of creativity that creates a masterful Rube-
Goldberg system, and the same sort of creativity that creates complex formulas
to describe and generalize real life occurrences. Your brain knows the
constraints, sub-patterns, and has an array of tools that allow it to
intuitively define the form, and you go through processes to fit it.

~~~
erasmuse
What I mean is that intelligence and creativity are independent of each other
and since most people don't make significant contributions to culture then
neither do most intelligent people.

------
gt_
Did anyone else find the ostentacious sentence structuring in the article
distracting, and a little infuriating? Sure, writing is an art form; I get it.
I sometimes wonder if this very thing is what readers of _The New Yorker_
actually want.

~~~
s17n
I didn't... you mean the overuse of commas?

~~~
marak830
That depends on how you were taught, if you were taught using the Oxford
style, than it really becomes more natural to write, as if you speak.

An example being, each time you would make a slight pause in your sentence,
than a comma is required, otherwise you would keep writing until a sentence
has ended with a period, or as I was originally taught, a full colon.

~~~
Retra
What is "Oxford style?" Do you have a reference?

If you're talking about the 'Oxford comma', then that is definitely not a
style advocating for gratuitous comma usage in general, only an extra one on
the final item of a list.

Outside of lists, commas are used to separate clauses. They are never used so
separate subjects and verbs, as that is always awkward and superfluous. It has
nothing to do with pauses, and much more to do with coordinating intonation
patterns.

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maxerickson
I saw a feature about this book on CBS Sunday Morning that lead me to believe
any biography written by Isaacson is likely to be a hagiography.

~~~
durango
Do you, by any chance, have any information on Da Vinci that's negative?

~~~
maxerickson
My comment is about Isaacson.

Unfortunately I haven't taken the time to read multiple biographies to try to
put his books into reasonable context. My comment is an attempt at getting
someone who may have to weigh in.

------
partycoder
The idea that Europe went from the middle ages into the Reinassance unassisted
thanks to a handful of people in Italy is eurocentric revisionism.

What really happened was:

After the Spanish Reconquista (the fall of Al-Andalus, or Islamic Spain), the
Toledo school of translators translated all the material brought from early
Islamic Universities (aka Madrasas) into Latin. Those books were then used in
the first European universities and scholar centers such as Oxford.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Latin_translations_of_the_12th...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Latin_translations_of_the_12th_century)

...also the Islamic empire was razed to the ground by the Mongols after the
Siege of Baghdad. A bunch of knowledge carefully collected for centuries
conveniently fell in European hands and today we have this urban myth of
people like Leonardo Da Vinci figuring it all out on his own.

There is merit in the Reinassance and people like Leonardo, but they are a
part of an uninterrupted chain of teaching and learning, not reclusive
geniuses that came out with all the answers out of nowhere, a premise that has
been used as the foundation for an arrogant sense of exceptionalism.

You can downvote this all you want but it won't make it false.

~~~
libertine
No one preaches that the Reinassance was unassisted, or that it was the source
of all knowledge - but the technological development that allowed this boom
came from Europe.

It's not by random chance that this creative boom came after the print press
was invented - in Europe.

After it, the knowledge that was limited to a few people, was spread out via a
media development: books, the medium that fueled all of this.

Leonardo was just curious, and had fuel to feed the curiosity, with answers.

~~~
CuriouslyC
It's questionable whether the printing press was an entirely novel invention.
Movable type printing had been around for centuries in China, it was just less
useful there due to the large number of pictographs. In fact one of the major
innovations of Gutenberg was the alloy he used for the type that was both
easily workable and durable in use.

Additionally, the major change people usually aren't aware of was the spread
of papermaking knowledge through Europe around the 12th and 13th century.
Before that point, most books were created on Parchment, which was much more
expensive. I've read somewhere that a single bible took ~3000 sheep to
produce.

~~~
libertine
But I didn't said it was a novel invention - yet it was indeed the European
concept/invention that thrived and allowed for the boom in Europe.

Regarding the papermaking, I believe we can fit it in the same boat as other
craftsmanship that evolved previously and allowing for the development for the
press itself (but definitely papermaker had a greater role in some dimension -
cost/manufacturing/distribution).

------
Alex3917
If you're going to read one bio from HN today, the one to read is the Joni
Mitchell one and not this:

[https://www.theringer.com/music/2017/10/16/16476254/joni-
mit...](https://www.theringer.com/music/2017/10/16/16476254/joni-mitchell-pop-
music-canon)

(This one is also good, the Joni Mitchell one was just better.)

