
Solitude and Leadership (2010) - onra87
https://theamericanscholar.org/solitude-and-leadership/#.XVp6cegzaUk
======
dang
A bunch of small threads:

2018
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17385586](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17385586)

2015
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10073663](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10073663)

2012
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4453300](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4453300)

2011
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2568945](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2568945)

2011
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2110779](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2110779)

2010
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1195641](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1195641)

and one larger one:

2010
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1476425](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1476425)

~~~
melling
How long would it take you to automate this process and pin it to the top or
side?

Date/#comments

~~~
dang
Probably until we get AGI, since I looked at the threads and decided which
ones were interesting. It's often the case that several searches are involved,
too; not just matching identical URLs.

Software could certainly help, though.

~~~
SkyMarshal
You could probably just have a dumb bot post all prior links to the submitted
URL with # of upvotes and comments for each one, then leave it to the readers
to sort through which are interesting. I’m sure you’d get at least some folks
digging through and reposing interesting/informative comments from previous
discussions, helping stimulate the current discussion. Not perfect but good
enough and relatively simple.

~~~
dang
Totally agree! but then the question becomes how to fit that in the UI in a
way that doesn't break HN's minimalism.

~~~
SkyMarshal
Just have the bot post it as a comment in the new post’s thread? Optionally
sticky that comment, but probably not necessary, it will probably be voted
near the top.

------
scottlocklin
>perhaps the finest soldier of his generation, General David Petraeus...

I thought this article was working its way up to some profound statement, then
I read this. Petraeus represents everything wrong with the modern leadership
caste of America. He was a brown nosing, social climbing, rat-faced paper
pushing _apparatchik_ who never served in combat, screwed up Mosul, screwed up
the rest of Iraq, then took credit for our massive "success" there, and
proceeded to "lead" the CENTCOM by issuing press releases his lizard overlords
told him to. Then he proceeded to "win" in Afghanistan (note sarcasm since
we're still bloody there), take over the CIA (overseeing one of the greatest
intelligence disasters of a recent US history littered with them: Benghazi),
and get caught with his dong in his nitwit hagiographer, exposing classified
information while he was at it to boot. He never showed any character or depth
of thought, but he was a genius at handling the media, which is pretty much
exactly the primary "leadership" characteristic of the modern era. Bleauch.
Patton was an American leader. Petraeus will be forgotten as thoroughly as
Gideon Pillow, excepting as a cautionary tale of who not to hire to pacify
foreign polities when your empire is in the late Brezhnev stage of
decomposition.

Anyway, yes, I am pretty sure Napoleon and Alexander the Great took long
walks, and thought about things deeply. I'm not sure I want such people
around, but I sure as shit don't want to hear about ding dongs like Petraeus
being worthy of emulation because the dude might have read a book once.

~~~
SkyMarshal
Dude, he spent 3 paragraphs on Petreaus. The whole article is 50 paragraphs.
Petraeus may be a bad example but the article itself is good. Try not to
completely derail the substance by fixating on one mistaken example.

The TLDR is - in order to escape group think and develop an original,
authentic, foresightful understanding of our world, we need periods of
solitude and reflection (and essentially forms of deep work though he doesn’t
use that term), away from the constant stream of informational noise of modern
life.

~~~
scottlocklin
Look, they didn't even make a case for why Petreaus had anything to do with
anything else in this rambling, disjointed, largely useless article. Using a
ding dong like that as the sole non-fictional example of "Leadership" pretty
much invalidates anything the yoyo author said. Though he did get me to reread
"Heart of Darkness" last night, so I got something out of it.

Honestly if you want actionable examples of actual leadership, any example
from Plutarch's lives is going to be more informative than 50 paragraphs of
hokum from some guy who makes his living flattering people who went to
Yalevard (he apparently wrote a whole book filled with this crap).

