
For progress to be by accumulation and not random walk, read great books (2010) - gmays
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/ufBYjpi9gK6uvtkh5/for-progress-to-be-by-accumulation-and-not-by-random-walk
======
quotemstr
I've had multiple arguments with people recently in which people have
recommended _not_ reading classic books on the grounds that the author held
"toxic" views --- even when the work being recommended had nothing to do with
these views, when the views were very common at the time (e.g., imperialism
can be good), or when, upon closer inspection, the author didn't even hold
these views at all, and just "lived in a structure that profited from them".

This anti-classics argument is distressingly common and it's impoverishing us
intellectually. This style of argumentation is a lazy and formulaic way of
dismissing practically any greater thinker. It's petty and shortsighted to
cast aspersions over useful and influential work on the grounds of
insufficient wokeness on the part of the dead.

~~~
bobwaycott
Ah, yes. I recall the first time I encountered this in the form of a trigger
warning placed by Wilder Publications in _Kant 's Critiques_ (which collected
Kant's _Pure Reason_ , _Practical Reason_ , and _Judgment_ ). It advised
parents to talk with their kids about the way we believe differently today
than Kant did two _centuries_ ago before _allowing_ them to read the old
German philosopher.

I've since seen and heard about so many more instances of this, that I wonder
how on earth any allegedly adult college student can make it through a
philosophy course anymore. Or history, psychology, sociology, literature, etc.
I can't think of many significant figures in the whole of human history who
didn't hold some kind of position that was a byproduct of their time that
could be judged objectionable in some way by today's standards--and that now
seems to be used as all the reason needed to completely disregard engaging
with someone who is recognized as having had a transformative impact on
history and thought. It's all very disheartening.

~~~
olavk
> It advised parents to talk with their kids about...

Was the implication that parent would read Kant for their kids? Or what is
going on here?

Edit: A bit of googling shows that apparently this publisher only publishes
texts old enough to be public domain and just include this warning as a
standard boilerplate regardless of the content. So this have probably nothing
to do with Kant or any book in particular.

~~~
jandrese
Thanks for doing the legwork on this.

It's still a dumb warning, but at least it's being applied in the dumbest way
possible.

------
xamuel
"A classic is something everybody wants to have read, but no one wants to
read." \--Mark Twain

It's amazing how much low-hanging fruit there is in classics. When I read
Darwin's "Origin of Species", I found that a huge amount of it was devoted to
this thing called the "Knight-Darwin Law" which was extremely important to
Darwin but which seemingly vanished out of all knowledge around the turn of
the 20th century, as if no-one was actually reading the book since then. Then
I wrote a couple papers related to that Law, which ended up being my most
successful work so far.

~~~
toasterlovin
For anybody else not familiar, the Knight-Darwin Law is the idea that plants
do not self-fertilize exclusively (many plants have both male and female sex
organs). Darwin goes on at length in On The Origin of Species about the
mechanisms that plants employ to avoid self fertilization.

My own take is that this makes a lot of sense. Male and female sex organs are
pretty sophisticated adaptations. Features which are that complicated
generally don’t evolve unless they are useful and there are easier ways for an
organism to clone itself than self fertilization.

~~~
xamuel
Darwin actually articulates a much-more-precise law (which serves as a
cornerstone of his whole book). I've argued in my papers that the KDL is in
fact an infinite-graph-theoretical statement (remarkable because infinite
graph theory was not a mainstream "thing" until well after Darwin).

Let G be the graph of all organisms (past, present and future), with an edge
directed from u to v if and only if u is a biological parent of v. The spirit
of the KDL is: "G does not contain any infinite directed path consisting
entirely of vertices with only one parent". Or equivalently: "Every infinite
directed path in G necessarily contains a vertex with two parents."

For its time, the above statement is _astonishingly_ mathematically
sophisticated. If anything, Darwin is still greatly underrated.

~~~
gowld
It reads like you are adding the mathematical sophistication to an intuitive
idea. An "an infinite directed path consisting entirely of vertices with only
one parent" is simply a chain.

~~~
xamuel
Compare König's lemma [1] ("every infinite tree contains a vertex of infinite
degree or an infinite simple path"), often considered the first example of
infinite graph theory. It wasn't articulated until 1927, almost half a century
after Darwin's death.

[1]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/K%C3%B6nig%27s_lemma](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/K%C3%B6nig%27s_lemma)

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chrisdone
The characterization of philosophical delight as "progress" is a downer.

~~~
TomMckenny
I'd even argue that exploring ideas with per-planed intent is going to limit
readers to concepts they already have.

------
mark_l_watson
I agree that by reading I can more quickly understand some things but I try to
balance my time by setting aside large blocks of time for thinking about my
own philosophy.

I have never spent much time reading this Less Wrong web site but recently I
did buy the 50 hour Audible book ‘Rationality: from AI to Zombies’ to list too
when working in the kitchen, etc.

~~~
bobwaycott
I've found Less Wrong to be quite a fantastic read over the last decade. The
Rationality series is great, as is the Quantum Physics Sequence.[0]

[0]: [https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/hc9Eg6erp6hk9bWhn/the-
quantu...](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/hc9Eg6erp6hk9bWhn/the-quantum-
physics-sequence)

------
bsmith
Here's an archive of the blog post the broken link points to:
[https://web.archive.org/web/20100307015535/http://www.infini...](https://web.archive.org/web/20100307015535/http://www.infiniteinjury.org/blog/2010/02/25/reading-
originals/)

------
jeromebaek
The world is certainly mad, and this is a good post. What was the article that
prompted this post? The link is broken.

~~~
tzs
Here's the archive.org snapshot of the blog the broken link references:

[https://web.archive.org/web/20100307015535/http://www.infini...](https://web.archive.org/web/20100307015535/http://www.infiniteinjury.org/blog/2010/02/25/reading-
originals/)

~~~
randcraw
IMHO, the archive article makes the better point -- that if a subject wants to
advance (e.g. economics, biology, psychology) no scientist today should
require the primary teaching texts in academia to be the first ever written on
the topic, a century or even a millenium ago. But economics and philosophy,
and even parts of cognitive science and psychology still do exactly this.

No, a more productive pedagogy should begin with texts written as recently as
possible, perhaps to build on early principles but more importantly to add as
much to them as possible while revising all errors and omissions.

Today nobody learning biology or medicine begins with Darwin, Galen, or
Hippocrates. But economics and philosophy still expect their neophytes to read
with care the scrolls of ancient dead white men as if their words had been
written on clay tablets by the gods.

Surely _that_ is a point worth reconsidering.

~~~
eksemplar
I disagree, classical philosophy is what sparked the enlightenment, and the
fact that so few scholars read those texts today, is probably why we are
heading into a new age of stupidity.

Obviously you can get great in the field of physics or mathematics without
reading Plato, but you really shouldn’t, because the works and thoughts of
Plato are the foundation of our free society. And that’s just Plato, you
really should enrich your life by reading classics of your field as well as
philosophy, classic literature, arts and history.

In my country we have a word to describe this, it’s called “dannelse”, and I
can’t find an English word for it. The closest thing I’ve been able to come up
with to describe it is: _”give people a broad, general basis for developing
their talents to the maximum and growing into strong, open and multi-faceted
individuals who can assume their responsibility in society to the full.”_. In
my country, you can’t attend the university without a minimum foundation of
classical philosophy, because you can’t do science if you don’t understand how
knowledge is obtained, but I’ve never met an actual scientist who didn’t
actually delve deeper into those aspects of life, because they offer so much
in return.

Another example is programming. Who would you rather hire? Someone who is self
taught, or someone who’s educated in best practices and patterns? The latter,
because they won’t repeat the mistakes of the past 25 years. Every science is
like this, and if you don’t educte yourself on the past, you’re really just
wasting your time, making someone else’s mistake.

The real irony of the original story is that it excludes history from this.
History happens to be my field, and unlike most other sciences, our classical
works are mostly full of lies. Because they weren’t written to keep track of
history, but to further the authors political agenda at the time. We use them
only because we have to.

~~~
dragonwriter
> I disagree, classical philosophy is what sparked the enlightenment

The rediscovery of classical philosophy spurred the _Renaissance_ , the
Enlightenment was later and, though it built opon the Renaissance, not really
directly stimulated by classical philosophy.

~~~
jeromebaek
If you read "Africa, Asia and the History of Philosophy" you'll see how this
whole story of "Ancient Greeks were great philosophers but then their
knowledge was buried during the Dark Ages by Muslim conquerors and when their
knowledge was recovered during the Renaissance by Jesuit scholars the torch of
wisdom lit bright again and the world found Enlightenment, yada yada" is the
same sort of thing as tribal myths of "primitive" cultures

~~~
toasterlovin
FWIW, I think the standard narrative is that knowledge of the great Greek and
Roman works was lost in Europe as a result of the fall of the Western Roman
Empire and the immense reduction in civilizational complexity that it
entailed, not as a result of Muslim conquest.

~~~
jschwartzi
And further you'll find the standard narrative is that the Arabic world was
responsible for preserving many of the great classical works and for advancing
knowledge of mathematics and science during the middle ages.

~~~
aestetix
Not solely responsible. For example, they didn't care about artistic works,
and so they didn't take any cares to preserve greek plays.

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newscracker
The title needs a "(2010)" in it for better context.

~~~
dang
Thanks, added.

