

Harvard and Heroin - danhak
http://archive.salon.com/mwt/feature/1999/08/27/heroinson/

======
wheels
Are drugs so relevant to Hacker News that not only do we have to have an
article a week about them, but we're fishing out copy from 10 years ago?

~~~
josh_nyc
Shot in the dark:

Maybe there's a connection between the narrator's struggle and an
entrepreneur's struggle. Both seem to enjoy the fight to overcome mediocrity
and strive for their goals despite hardships and constraints, but the
narrator's hardships and constraints are entirely of his own making. Check
this quote:

 _"I loved the feeling: Floating slightly above everything but still able to
cope with the world, sensing that I was somehow special, or at least
different, that I belonged to a secret and exclusive club."_

Couldn't that apply to a hacker? At least in the abstract?

Food for thought...

~~~
josh_nyc
Well, all I know is I enjoyed the article and that I believe I can find value
and knowledge from disparate sources regardless of their topical relevance.

I also realize that HN _is_ trying to remain topically focused.

To much of the world, the thought of making life more difficult by forging
your own path/company/livelihood/etc, as opposed to settling for an easy job,
seems akin to choosing make your life more difficult through addictions. I
know it may appear I'm stretching it, but it's a fun mental exercise.

------
mkuhn
Fascinating read, he seems to be doing well now...
<http://www.sethmnookin.com/blog/index.php>,
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seth_Mnookin>

------
thamer
Article in one page:
[http://archive.salon.com/mwt/feature/1999/08/27/heroinson/pr...](http://archive.salon.com/mwt/feature/1999/08/27/heroinson/print.html)

~~~
mhb
Article in three phrases: Guy makes it through high school and college while
high. Damages relationship with family. May or may not be OK now.

~~~
felixc
I hate these kinds of summaries. I am sorry to be picking on yours
specifically right now, which is no worse than any of the others that are
posted to every article longer than three paragraphs, but I just have to say
something.

These sarcastic little snippet summaries take all the meaning and value out of
the stories. What you wrote is factually correct, but completely misses the
point. Much writing is not about the information you extract from it, but the
process of telling the story.

People like me (and I assume you too) who have technical backgrounds often
miss this, because we're so used to a reducible world where the value of an
expression is simply the output it evaluates to. Biography and fiction do not
work that way, and that doesn't mean they're less valuable.

You can learn much more about human nature, the thought processes of great
minds, or different world-views and cultures (to name just a few examples) by
observing how they reach their conclusions and how they tell their stories
than you can from the mere factual outcomes of the stories themselves.

In short, these summaries miss the point and are nothing but aggravating
because they make the mistake of thinking that the article is about the facts
of his life. I don't know this guy, and I don't care about how he made it
through high school. I do, however, care about his experiences, thought
processes, value conflicts, and the world view of someone in a situation like
his. Your summary has taken the meat of the story out and left us with a dried
out bone, lacking even the marrow of the context.

Dave Barry has a very humorous example where he intentionally makes the same
mistake:

I'm told that Dostoyevsky wrote "The Brothers Karamazov" to raise the question
of whether there is a God. So why didn't he just come right out and say: "Is
there a God? It sure beats the heck out of me." Other famous works could
easily have been summarized in a few words:

* "Moby Dick" -- Don't mess around with large whales because they symbolize nature and will kill you.

* "A Tale of Two Cities" -- French people are crazy.

~~~
mhb
I appreciate your sentiment and, in general, I think you have a point about
short comments such as mine. But, in this instance, I think it is reasonable
to be dismissive of this story in this context.

I honestly don't understand the value of this story, why it is on HN, why
anyone has upmodded it and why it hasn't been killed. There are plenty of off-
topic human interest stories which I find compelling (one example is the great
one describing a writer's experience interviewing Mr. Rogers) and wouldn't
mind seeing here occasionally even if they don't strictly meet the submission
criteria.

My expectation upon seeing an off-topic story here (and with so many points!)
is that it is of such compellingly high quality that reading it is probably
justified. I'm sure we can conjure up some allegorical way in which this story
is relevant to both me and many others here, but there is plenty of real
literature which does that much more effectively.

------
hvs
Seth Mnookin wrote a great book detailing the Jayson Blair-New York Time's
scandal as well:

[http://www.amazon.com/Hard-News-Twenty-one-Changed-
American/...](http://www.amazon.com/Hard-News-Twenty-one-Changed-
American/dp/0812972511)

------
mhb
How does this boring account qualify as satisfying anyone's "intellectual
curiosity"? Will "Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas" be posted soon?

