As an old man I now think the art and humanities classes in school landed at the wrong time.
You need context to really understand a book or a work of art. You want to know what kind of environment produced it, what it's talking to.
But when you're in school, there isn't time for that. You aren't going to know a bunch of things about history to put things into context, because there simply isn't enough time for it.
So you end up doing a bunch of weird commentary on say a book where you as a teenager have no idea where to place it. Like if you read Dickens, will you know enough about the industrial revolution, the condition of cities at the time, and such? Will you know what kind of thing the characters would care about?
How would you know what the characters in Pride and Prejudice are worried about if you don't know how that society is?
So as a kid it just totally didn't mean anything to me, it was just a strange torture where you are meant to comment on the motivations of the characters and how the writing style brings that out.
> So as a kid it just totally didn't mean anything to me, it was just a strange torture
A lot of school is like this though. English is basically my only language, I have taught myself some very basic Spanish over the years but it is a struggle when you are busy and don't have a consistent routine. I can't believe that for years the state paid a professional to spend hours each week trying to teach me not one but two languages and I completely wasted it. I just had no interest.
In school they basically teach you a bit of everything (maths, science, languages, arts, history, etc), if you are lucky you will take to one or two of those subjects and view the rest as a chore, but all of them are potentially valuable if you really embrace them.
> So you end up doing a bunch of weird commentary on say a book where you as a teenager have no idea where to place it. Like if you read Dickens, will you know enough about the industrial revolution, the condition of cities at the time, and such? Will you know what kind of thing the characters would care about?
Ideally, a good English teacher will explain these things, and/or you will also be learning history which may touch on them. Sure, maybe that isn't enough, but I still think it is better for people to be exposed to these things at a young age. Many young people do actually really take to these works and get a lot of value out of them.
It felt even worse when reading Shakespeare, which is nominally the same language you and I speak, but just barely. Add the fact that it's a play, where the performance carries a lot of the meaning.
The end result was that I - and as far as I could tell, 99% of my classmates - got basically negative value out of sitting in class and reading lines we didn't understand out loud, without even time to try and parse it out because we were too busy just scanning the lines to see when it was our turn to speak.
I have heard that Shakespeare is much easier and more enjoyable for non-English speakers, because they get modern translations and we do not
Linguist John McWhorter says that Shakespeare is often an "the Emperor has no clothes" situation. No one wants to admit to themselves or others that they don't understand it, and the people who think they understand it are often misunderstanding a lot of it
Now, maybe I was convincing myself that I understood in high school when I’ve in fact it not, but I found that reading it aloud and trying to say the words, as if you were the character (acting, if you will), made it much more understandable.
I had the same experience reading A Midsummer Night's Dream in high school -- I could follow the story, but it was a slog to get through and I didn't understand what was supposed to be so great about it.
Then I saw an actual performance of the play recently, and it all clicked. It was just as understandable as any contemporary film, and easily one of the most fun and entertaining stories I've seen.
Yes, I agree completely with the Shakespeare point.
I was lucky enough to have a close friend (also a teenager!) who really got Shakespeare. She would explain to me what was actually going on, and read it with the correct emphasis so you could mostly actually follow it. She is 100% of the reason that I was ever able to appreciate Shakespeare.
You would hope that most teachers could do this, but in my experience it was only my one friend who had the literary and dramatic talent to explain Shakespeare well to teenagers.
It’s certainly true that an adult would tend to have more additional knowledge and be better able to understand a lot of writing, but if you avoid exposing kids to anything they don’t have total understanding of the context of, you won’t really be able to teach them anything. Discussing books can help provide some of that context they’re missing. It’s probably fine to teach arithmetic before algebraic number theory too.
> Like if you read Dickens, will you know enough about the industrial revolution, the condition of cities at the time, and such? Will you know what kind of thing the characters would care about?
I think this depends on who is reading it, but not the "obviously" type of depends. I'd imagine a teenager from America reading it would have a different take than someone from the UK (possibly Europe at large as well). A lot of that understanding will come from the context of living in the same area. A lot of history is learned/absorbed without formal teaching. Kids just ask questions about various buildings and the why? type of questions that start forming that kind of context.
I'm not sure I would necessarily agree with "strange torture" more like "sore muscles from exercising mental muscles". Yes I remember hating The Great Gatsby when I was 14 and having to read it critically in school, I sure didn't have a lot context, but I remember having to do it, and I can look back after years of secondary and post secondary schooling and appreciate the exercise.
I think we should be much denser and more rigorous with school material in the middle/high schoolers, at least relative to what my experience in public school USA was, but that's sort of a separate discussion.
> But when you're in school, there isn't time for that. You aren't going to know a bunch of things about history to put things into context, because there simply isn't enough time for it.
I think you just had bad teachers. Historical context was always part of the English language/literature curricula at my high school, and it definitely made a difference. I didn’t even go to a good school. Our district was the worst funded in our state with a 40% dropout rate.
Depends on your teachers and your school. I've been lucky to have really good teachers despite attending public schools from K-12 (except Spanish - my Spanish teachers sucked. Turns out being fluent Spanish first speakers doesn't make someone a good teacher).
I think books in education often serve as an means to putting yourself in those scenarios and attempting to learn more about different times and cultures.
I think the Joni Mitchell song Both Sides Now applies, life is a conversation with experience.. you are not the same person you were in your teens, in your twenties.. and once you go through life some more life you perspectives shift even more drastically. Doesn't mean younger perspectives are useless.. you were more engaged with the world when you younger and more innocent.. you really can't get back to that
I don't know any 50+ year who really looks as young people as anything other than filtered reflections of themselves who will learn on their own..
is innocence unwise and experience embittered? Perhaps but that is a Judgemental and cynical perspective - we need more perspective in this world..and we must expose our best art early so that conversation can begin...The young will get there.
I feel like it depends on how the classics are introduced.
Being forced to read classics in their original form, while illuminating is unneccesary at the K-12 level where classics, humanities, and arts are meant to spark curiosity and an openness to synthesis.
Using abridged adaptations (eg. Illustrated abridged classics, wishbone) aren't a bad way to impart much of the ethos of those works.
> Why this word, this scene, this character, and not some other one?
The "why this not that, even when it looks like that would do just fine" style of differential analysis is an exquisitely powerful analytical tool. Asking this question is probably the single most powerful method I know of to generate deep thought, in absolutely any aspect of life. If you haven't tried it... go for it!
(Sample question: why'd I choose the word "exquisitely" in the above sentence?)
> In the short term, thinness prevails. ... The real question is not “which of these things looks nicer when you look at them for two seconds?” but “which of these things will stand the test of time?”
That tracks with another thing I've noticed I approach differently. I've recently joined a book club and everyone loves to talk about how many "stars" they gave a book. I've never really been able to rank things like that. Aside from there being no such thing as a total ordering of books (or movies or ...), who's to say what five stars from you means, compared to five stars from me? Instead I've started thinking about books in terms of "book of the month", "book of the year", "book of the decade", "book of the century", et cetera. Is this going to be the best thing I read all month or all decade? Am I going to remember this for a year or forget most of it next week? Is everyone still going to be talking about this one in 80 years? I think that's a much better scale than "one to five stars (but actually three to five stars)", and much more interesting. It also bakes in both the inherent subjectivity and inherent fuzziness really well.
(Yes, some things... plenty of things... are thin enough to be candidates for "book of the day" or "book of the hour". Few things are forgettable enough to go below that, though there have been some attempts; mostly at that level things underflow and you get in to Mystery Science Theater 3000 territory, which is its own special kind of thing.)
> Is this going to be the best thing I read all month or all decade?
Many times it is only possible to know that post hoc. There are several books I've read that, in the moment of completing them, stand as the best I'd read in the past few years. Others I finished and figured I'd never think of them past the current month.
But books and their impact upon you can be surprising sometimes. There are some books I think about often, and that I would say have even influenced me greatly, that I wouldn't have guessed would have that impact when I read them. And others that I figured would remain "book of the decade" that barely made it to the two-year mark before being surpassed by something else.
> Instead I've started thinking about books in terms of "book of the month", "book of the year", "book of the decade", "book of the century", et cetera. Is this going to be the best thing I read all month or all decade? Am I going to remember this for a year or forget most of it next week?
There's an interesting part of this that's mentioned in the comments that the original author states:
> Haha I had a section in this, but cut it, about how people jokingly suggest we should include one regular person in every Olympic event to show just how astounding Olympic athletes are, and this is also a good idea for art...
I've been getting into fiction writing a bit recently and learning to focus on incremental improvement is necessary, for example, getting feedback and trying to find good venues to get it is a challenge because getting helpful constructive feedback is hard
I'm beginning to wonder if, because the skill level of the creators of media the average person consumes on a regular basis is so high, it's actually difficult to get good feedback for learning from by asking them until you get to a minimum baseline of skill and improvement is constrained by finding environments that can provide high quality feedback
The best thing about gaining an appreciation of this aspect of life is it opens up so many extra pleasures. I can spend an entire day at the (free entry!) V&A in London and never be bored. Likewise with a great book (when my 11-year-old isn't around!)
> But those works were much more like dark, winding caves with treasure stashed inside of them. My teachers were like, “Right, well, into the cave you go!” and I was like “But there’s nothing in there” and they were like “Entering the cave is 30% of your grade” and so I took a few steps into the darkness and I was like “Just as I suspected: an empty cave” and then I came trudging back out and pretended that I saw something.
That part made me feel seen. I took a handful of literature classes, all to satisfy some requirement. I don't think I ever once generated a genuine appreciation of any of it. Sometimes a resentment (particularly for Shakespeare) but most often just an indifference. Like maybe there's something there, but if so, it must be for other people who are just better at understanding this stuff. It's not for me. I just need to come up with some plausible ideas to get through this class with a passing grade.
In my understanding of literature, I went through the same arc as the poster, but then I made it to the next realization- "thickness" is just your willingness to give authors credit for things they didn't write, and it can be done just as well for works that are considered "schlock" as it can for the canon of works that are considered "great".
You can read "Moby Dick" as a story about a fish, and you can read "50 shades of grey" as a treatise on existentialism and the human spirit- it's all up to you!
I'm sure this aesthetic relativism holds up under argument, but this is an 'anti realization' that:
-Reduces explanatory power (if Moby-Dick and 50 Shades are the same, why has one been lauded for 100 years, minted the careers of countless academics, etc.?)
One of them has existed for more than 100 years. One of them has been granted credibility by a small number of academics before becoming a safe conservative choice for subsequent ones.
I don't know, but those sounds like some plausible answers.
I remember hearing once that a core element of collegiate humanities education involves teaching that a great work can only be understood and appreciated when the reader first understands the work's context. Only then should the reader attempt to summit the great work.
Of course, this is also true in engineering disciplines as well. Perhaps the greatest software engineering work is the Linux kernel. Open the repo, and navigate to a random line in a random file. The odds that you will understand exactly--and I mean exactly--what occurs on that particular line on your first read without an explanatory comment is relatively low. If, however, you consider header files, libraries, how the file fits into the broader kernel, language features, and additional contextual information, your ability to understand that line of code increases significantly.
Really loved this essay, loved the irreverent style. I had a similar literary journey as this guy.
I think I would take it a step further though. It's not just that great literature has details and motifs that line up perfectly, it's not just that it took great effort to produce, or has some musicality or rhythm that is beautiful to take in experientially. It's that the thing that is communicated is truthful. Great fiction wipes away the noise of one's day-to-day thinking into some deep and essential truth about the human experience.
Which is difficult, because that type of truth is not mathematical, it cannot be arrived at through some standalone logical path. I think students suffer because instruction by its nature is framed as teaching a path to get to some destination. The author mentions this with the egg cracking metaphor. The reason that fiction can produce this type of truth and non-fiction cannot is that fiction relays a human experience, it's relational and personal and that is the whole point of it. And you get that transcendental truth out of it because our life experience is fundamentally relational, it is how we see ourselves in relation to others or god or nature or what have you.
Seeing fiction that way is the main difference between myself at 16 and myself today.
I wonder whether people who use open source software in the way I do are merely providing the egg (in the context of tfa). Most people, that I know, rarely modify the code in any way and merely build and use. Do not even read it most times. But, it somehow conveys a sense of _doing_ something that the mere install of a binary does not.
This was very good to read. I would like to add "form/structure" to attributes of "thick"ness. It is possible for good art to adhere strictly to a form and yet be universal and transcend the confines imposed by form. E.g. meters in poems. When I write a poem, the imposed constraints make me weigh and choose from multiple words in a way that free-verse doesn't. Now whether that makes for better reading or not is something a reader should say :)
> The Met Cloisters has these wooden altarpieces from the 1400s that draw your attention immediately, I think because the mind can subconsciously calculate the time it must have taken to carve them, and it sends a signal back to the eyes: important. You know that you are not just seeing a work of art, but the expenditure of a life.
Reminds me of one part of Vernor Vinge's "A Deepness in the Sky".
I’ve long held the opinion that humans ‘over’-value complexity. It’s why we can spend so much time tasting, analyzing, and enjoying fancy coffee or whisky - despite the fact that almost everyone is repulsed by them the first time they try them. Literature might be the same?
The simpler pleasures and pains of life are easier to speak to and we have a lot more (proportionally) media that reflects those experiences. Particular media does it better and worse and so there's a hierarchy, but if you are looking to have your enjoyment of good food and drink reflected in a story that's pretty easy to find.
But life is often more complex than that and it requires great skill to accurately reflect that complexity in creative works. When you're struggling with an experience that is difficult to talk about and understand, a creative work that seems to "get it" can be really valuable in sorting out how to think about that experience. I rarely need help in describing how much I like coffee, but I welcome good writing on the subject of "how should one understand the mixed experience of being very close to someone who you often disagree with."
Good writing isn't complex for complexity's sake though. Mistaking complexity for quality is the most common mistake when it comes to writing — and I allege one central reason why many people like and trust LLM output.
I'd argue that complexity is not even the right word to describe what the author describes. Thickness or depth is more accurate.
To add on - complexity itself is a perceptual feature introduced by language - we treat and describe things as though they are made of an unimaginable number of tiny parts. So this also increases the fun of the wordy wine/coffee/whisky descriptions!
I get your idea but I wonder about the construction of this argument:
Is it the complexity itself people value, or the rewards of things that are complex? IME, the most valuable things are complex. Maybe that's because there is not enough capacity in simplicity to contain exceptional value (speaking very generally and loosely - we really need to define terms).
Also, I certainly think people value complex things, but I strongly disagree that they are over-valued. All the best things in my life seem complex.
I could imagine that complexity stimulates the brain in a different way and that adds to reward.
I genuinely think that the vast majority of English teachers have had experiences like this. It's what made them become English teachers.
Then, with all the best intent in the world, they try to explain to their students "Look, you don't get this, this fat book is transcendent if you can just sit with it and understand it! I, too, used to think that English class was just stupid words that they force you to read, but let me help you get this! You've got to..."
But all their students hear is Charlie Brown's adults going "Waa waa waa..." because they're genuinely not mature and experienced enough to "get" the book the way the English teacher understood it.
Ten years later a student will re-read one of their literature books, have this same epiphany, and talk excitedly about deep literature is, and someone will tell them they ought to be an English teacher. And the cycle continues.
Ok, so some English teachers are of course better than others, and some will convey their excitement a little better, and some students will be mature enough to understand it better than others.
But I will definitely maintain that all (close to all) English teachers have this same love of books, and want desperately to pass it on.
"I know exactly the feeling that these slop-trepeneurs are preying on, because I feel it all the time: I’ve got these thoughts in my head, and boy oh boy they’re good ones, all-timers, really, and it’s so annoying that I have to spend all this time making the words sound good, when the ideas behind the words are already so good!
But this is an illusion. The ideas are not already good. They need to be thickened. I understand why it’s tempting to force a machine do the hard part for you, but it can’t, and the hard part is the only part worth doing anyway. Making something thick—that’s a lot of pressure! But remember: you were built to perform under pressure, and that’s just what you’ll do."
This is so true. I should re-read this weekly and not feel like some ultra-philosopher trapped by his own laziness... I can just... not feel guilty, the ideas are not that good... yet.
There's a lot of truth to this, but....... fuck they did a great job disincentivizing it.
In high school we had to read and annotate this 900p Greek mythology book during our summer break. Our grade reflected how well we annotated it. I didn't do any of it (thanks Ultima Online).
The very first in-class assignment we had that year took about an hour and had about a 25% bigger impact on our grade than annotating did.
Not saying that grades are the end goal but it felt like a slap in the face that the exploration of such a deep topic just.. didn't matter.
There's a lot of great things about this piece, but I'm kind of stuck on the "Hieronymus Bosch Butt Music". Listened to it a bunch of times now. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OnrICy3Bc2U
> The slop-acalypse that so many of us fear,
> when people will stop looking at anything
> made by humans and only look at things made
> by machines—why hasn’t that happened yet?
I contend people will be willing, even eager, to pay a premium for content provably produced by humans.
Are you an artist? A woodworker? Metalsmith? ... start recording your work and post it to youtube. I guarantee people will be willing to pay extra for the thing you built (I certainly would).
> The slop-acalypse that so many of us fear, when people will stop looking at anything made by humans and only look at things made by machines—why hasn’t that happened yet?
Unfortunately, I'm pessimistic here. I don't think the slop-acalypse is held back by taste or an appreciation for "thickness". I think there's already very successful slop media in the world (e.g. see microdramas). In other words, it is happening, but like anything else, it's happening in a non-evenly distributed way.
Something I learned recently and which this article sort of hints at - look at the three drafts of Under The Wave Off Kanagawa. The composition is different, but also the colours are much more muted. In the first draft, the only colours highlighted are the people in the corner; in the second, the cliffs. The third draft finally colours the wave, but it's a sedate grey-blue. It's not until the fourth draft that everybody recognizes that we get this brilliant dark blue wave rising up over the the boat, dwarfing the mountain in the background.
And that's because when Hokusai sat down to print that fourth draft, people had recently started exporting prussian blue dye to Japan; prior to that point, he just straight up didn't have access to that striking blue colour that dominates the print.
Although I appreciate the article, what's the deal with calling depth thickness? Is it because it looks like the meme word 'thicc'?
> If you allow for the existence of secret treasures that can only be accessed with effort and analysis, then you empower the elitists and the snobs. “Buddy, don’t even talk to me until you’ve been in the cave!”
I don't agree with this statement. Being a snob and/or elitist means looking down upon others. If you appreciate these 'secret treasures' without being a dick about it, everybody wins.
I imagine the word thickness represents the great number of (metaphorical) layers of a painting, since paintings are the reoccurring symbol to talk about art in this essay.
I don't think the author is claiming you HAVE to be a dick about it. But that the pursuit of "thickness" does in reality give ammunition to a lot of people who are inevitably dicks about it seems observably true to me.
It's almost as though the author thought about and cared about the content and exact words he chose. "Thick or Treat" and "Thickening agents" and "Slim pickings" even immediately evoking imagery of a thin slop gruel in my own head.
By using an unexpected word I think I thought more critically about it, in fact. Had the author used depth I would've immediately had more superficial imagery in my own head.
I think I like the term "thickness" over "depth" here because thickness implies a sort of solidity, an ability to stand up to being held and examined, turned over and and handled. Depth can feel unapproachable (the ocean is pretty deep and it is famously challenging to explore) while something which has thickness intuitively feels like you can walk right up to it and try to learn something.
This doesn't hold for all things - I would, for example, describe a wine as having "depth" but probably not "thickness" because in the case of potables "thickness" also implies a particular sort of textural feel, but I do like the idea of a piece of art as being thick with meaning as opposed to deep. A book which is deep can be reread multiple times, but a book which has thickness just sounds like a book that can live on your bookshelf and be paged through year after year for decades, with not only the content to support it but also the sturdiness to hold up to the use.
I really enjoyed reading this and I've been thinking along similar lines when I imagine viable careers of the future. No one will care if code is "thick" but why would anyone buy a novel written by AI? What does the reader get out of it? It seems like the humanities might be the most stable career path available.
i’m working on a little ios widget display currently. even a tiny little one view box has hundreds of nuanced design and structure decisions behind it.
That reasoning is the thickness not the amount of code that powers it though they are somewhat interrelated.
By rejecting postmodernism and even the Enlightenment (due to the overwhelming reactionary messaging) most people have unilaterally disarmed themselves, or so I hypothesize. It's hard to talk about these things in any specific, evidence-based way, but here is the idea:
Without the ultimate postmodern truth that there is none, that deep skepticism of power especially and always of oneself, how do people decide what to embrace? Whatever is effectively sold to them, no questions asked. There isn't an instinctive worry about but an almost survival-level embrace of mass messaging - the way is to be safe in the crowd, not to doubt it or to worry about its power in society and its effect on you.
And without believing in the Enlightenment vision of the transformative power of our minds to make a better humanity, expressed especially in art as the pinnacle of human expression and acheivement, art is ruled out and actually threatens your worldview (and that reactionary messaging) of powerlessness and survival.
It's always funny to me how often comments like yours show up, despite a long history on here of diverse thoughts and intellectual curiosities, technological or otherwise.
But especially funny and bewildering in this case is that you have this in your About section of your HN user account:
> A journey from the liberal arts to hacking the latest gadgets or statistics.
As you delve further into the article, and (ironically, based on the topic) consider the ideas presented, it becomes more clear. Or skip to near the end to see.
TLDR: AI and generic pop culture artifacts have something in common - a lack of a certain type of depth that makes art great.
You need context to really understand a book or a work of art. You want to know what kind of environment produced it, what it's talking to.
But when you're in school, there isn't time for that. You aren't going to know a bunch of things about history to put things into context, because there simply isn't enough time for it.
So you end up doing a bunch of weird commentary on say a book where you as a teenager have no idea where to place it. Like if you read Dickens, will you know enough about the industrial revolution, the condition of cities at the time, and such? Will you know what kind of thing the characters would care about?
How would you know what the characters in Pride and Prejudice are worried about if you don't know how that society is?
So as a kid it just totally didn't mean anything to me, it was just a strange torture where you are meant to comment on the motivations of the characters and how the writing style brings that out.
A lot of school is like this though. English is basically my only language, I have taught myself some very basic Spanish over the years but it is a struggle when you are busy and don't have a consistent routine. I can't believe that for years the state paid a professional to spend hours each week trying to teach me not one but two languages and I completely wasted it. I just had no interest.
In school they basically teach you a bit of everything (maths, science, languages, arts, history, etc), if you are lucky you will take to one or two of those subjects and view the rest as a chore, but all of them are potentially valuable if you really embrace them.
> So you end up doing a bunch of weird commentary on say a book where you as a teenager have no idea where to place it. Like if you read Dickens, will you know enough about the industrial revolution, the condition of cities at the time, and such? Will you know what kind of thing the characters would care about?
Ideally, a good English teacher will explain these things, and/or you will also be learning history which may touch on them. Sure, maybe that isn't enough, but I still think it is better for people to be exposed to these things at a young age. Many young people do actually really take to these works and get a lot of value out of them.
The end result was that I - and as far as I could tell, 99% of my classmates - got basically negative value out of sitting in class and reading lines we didn't understand out loud, without even time to try and parse it out because we were too busy just scanning the lines to see when it was our turn to speak.
Linguist John McWhorter says that Shakespeare is often an "the Emperor has no clothes" situation. No one wants to admit to themselves or others that they don't understand it, and the people who think they understand it are often misunderstanding a lot of it
Then I saw an actual performance of the play recently, and it all clicked. It was just as understandable as any contemporary film, and easily one of the most fun and entertaining stories I've seen.
I was lucky enough to have a close friend (also a teenager!) who really got Shakespeare. She would explain to me what was actually going on, and read it with the correct emphasis so you could mostly actually follow it. She is 100% of the reason that I was ever able to appreciate Shakespeare.
You would hope that most teachers could do this, but in my experience it was only my one friend who had the literary and dramatic talent to explain Shakespeare well to teenagers.
The big one for me is you don't necessarily know Elizabethan slang, but when you see the play performed, the dirty lines get delivered dirty.
I think this depends on who is reading it, but not the "obviously" type of depends. I'd imagine a teenager from America reading it would have a different take than someone from the UK (possibly Europe at large as well). A lot of that understanding will come from the context of living in the same area. A lot of history is learned/absorbed without formal teaching. Kids just ask questions about various buildings and the why? type of questions that start forming that kind of context.
I think we should be much denser and more rigorous with school material in the middle/high schoolers, at least relative to what my experience in public school USA was, but that's sort of a separate discussion.
I think you just had bad teachers. Historical context was always part of the English language/literature curricula at my high school, and it definitely made a difference. I didn’t even go to a good school. Our district was the worst funded in our state with a 40% dropout rate.
I don't know any 50+ year who really looks as young people as anything other than filtered reflections of themselves who will learn on their own..
is innocence unwise and experience embittered? Perhaps but that is a Judgemental and cynical perspective - we need more perspective in this world..and we must expose our best art early so that conversation can begin...The young will get there.
Being forced to read classics in their original form, while illuminating is unneccesary at the K-12 level where classics, humanities, and arts are meant to spark curiosity and an openness to synthesis.
Using abridged adaptations (eg. Illustrated abridged classics, wishbone) aren't a bad way to impart much of the ethos of those works.
The "why this not that, even when it looks like that would do just fine" style of differential analysis is an exquisitely powerful analytical tool. Asking this question is probably the single most powerful method I know of to generate deep thought, in absolutely any aspect of life. If you haven't tried it... go for it!
(Sample question: why'd I choose the word "exquisitely" in the above sentence?)
> In the short term, thinness prevails. ... The real question is not “which of these things looks nicer when you look at them for two seconds?” but “which of these things will stand the test of time?”
That tracks with another thing I've noticed I approach differently. I've recently joined a book club and everyone loves to talk about how many "stars" they gave a book. I've never really been able to rank things like that. Aside from there being no such thing as a total ordering of books (or movies or ...), who's to say what five stars from you means, compared to five stars from me? Instead I've started thinking about books in terms of "book of the month", "book of the year", "book of the decade", "book of the century", et cetera. Is this going to be the best thing I read all month or all decade? Am I going to remember this for a year or forget most of it next week? Is everyone still going to be talking about this one in 80 years? I think that's a much better scale than "one to five stars (but actually three to five stars)", and much more interesting. It also bakes in both the inherent subjectivity and inherent fuzziness really well.
(Yes, some things... plenty of things... are thin enough to be candidates for "book of the day" or "book of the hour". Few things are forgettable enough to go below that, though there have been some attempts; mostly at that level things underflow and you get in to Mystery Science Theater 3000 territory, which is its own special kind of thing.)
Many times it is only possible to know that post hoc. There are several books I've read that, in the moment of completing them, stand as the best I'd read in the past few years. Others I finished and figured I'd never think of them past the current month.
But books and their impact upon you can be surprising sometimes. There are some books I think about often, and that I would say have even influenced me greatly, that I wouldn't have guessed would have that impact when I read them. And others that I figured would remain "book of the decade" that barely made it to the two-year mark before being surpassed by something else.
This is a wonderful thought, I thank you for it
> Haha I had a section in this, but cut it, about how people jokingly suggest we should include one regular person in every Olympic event to show just how astounding Olympic athletes are, and this is also a good idea for art...
I've been getting into fiction writing a bit recently and learning to focus on incremental improvement is necessary, for example, getting feedback and trying to find good venues to get it is a challenge because getting helpful constructive feedback is hard
I'm beginning to wonder if, because the skill level of the creators of media the average person consumes on a regular basis is so high, it's actually difficult to get good feedback for learning from by asking them until you get to a minimum baseline of skill and improvement is constrained by finding environments that can provide high quality feedback
This was a nice metaphor, and made me smile :)
You can read "Moby Dick" as a story about a fish, and you can read "50 shades of grey" as a treatise on existentialism and the human spirit- it's all up to you!
-Reduces explanatory power (if Moby-Dick and 50 Shades are the same, why has one been lauded for 100 years, minted the careers of countless academics, etc.?)
-Makes the world less interesting
I don't know, but those sounds like some plausible answers.
Of course, this is also true in engineering disciplines as well. Perhaps the greatest software engineering work is the Linux kernel. Open the repo, and navigate to a random line in a random file. The odds that you will understand exactly--and I mean exactly--what occurs on that particular line on your first read without an explanatory comment is relatively low. If, however, you consider header files, libraries, how the file fits into the broader kernel, language features, and additional contextual information, your ability to understand that line of code increases significantly.
I think I would take it a step further though. It's not just that great literature has details and motifs that line up perfectly, it's not just that it took great effort to produce, or has some musicality or rhythm that is beautiful to take in experientially. It's that the thing that is communicated is truthful. Great fiction wipes away the noise of one's day-to-day thinking into some deep and essential truth about the human experience.
Which is difficult, because that type of truth is not mathematical, it cannot be arrived at through some standalone logical path. I think students suffer because instruction by its nature is framed as teaching a path to get to some destination. The author mentions this with the egg cracking metaphor. The reason that fiction can produce this type of truth and non-fiction cannot is that fiction relays a human experience, it's relational and personal and that is the whole point of it. And you get that transcendental truth out of it because our life experience is fundamentally relational, it is how we see ourselves in relation to others or god or nature or what have you.
Seeing fiction that way is the main difference between myself at 16 and myself today.
Reminds me of one part of Vernor Vinge's "A Deepness in the Sky".
To be clear, I enjoy all three!
But life is often more complex than that and it requires great skill to accurately reflect that complexity in creative works. When you're struggling with an experience that is difficult to talk about and understand, a creative work that seems to "get it" can be really valuable in sorting out how to think about that experience. I rarely need help in describing how much I like coffee, but I welcome good writing on the subject of "how should one understand the mixed experience of being very close to someone who you often disagree with."
I'd argue that complexity is not even the right word to describe what the author describes. Thickness or depth is more accurate.
Is it the complexity itself people value, or the rewards of things that are complex? IME, the most valuable things are complex. Maybe that's because there is not enough capacity in simplicity to contain exceptional value (speaking very generally and loosely - we really need to define terms).
Also, I certainly think people value complex things, but I strongly disagree that they are over-valued. All the best things in my life seem complex.
I could imagine that complexity stimulates the brain in a different way and that adds to reward.
Then, with all the best intent in the world, they try to explain to their students "Look, you don't get this, this fat book is transcendent if you can just sit with it and understand it! I, too, used to think that English class was just stupid words that they force you to read, but let me help you get this! You've got to..."
But all their students hear is Charlie Brown's adults going "Waa waa waa..." because they're genuinely not mature and experienced enough to "get" the book the way the English teacher understood it.
Ten years later a student will re-read one of their literature books, have this same epiphany, and talk excitedly about deep literature is, and someone will tell them they ought to be an English teacher. And the cycle continues.
Ok, so some English teachers are of course better than others, and some will convey their excitement a little better, and some students will be mature enough to understand it better than others.
But I will definitely maintain that all (close to all) English teachers have this same love of books, and want desperately to pass it on.
But this is an illusion. The ideas are not already good. They need to be thickened. I understand why it’s tempting to force a machine do the hard part for you, but it can’t, and the hard part is the only part worth doing anyway. Making something thick—that’s a lot of pressure! But remember: you were built to perform under pressure, and that’s just what you’ll do."
This is so true. I should re-read this weekly and not feel like some ultra-philosopher trapped by his own laziness... I can just... not feel guilty, the ideas are not that good... yet.
In high school we had to read and annotate this 900p Greek mythology book during our summer break. Our grade reflected how well we annotated it. I didn't do any of it (thanks Ultima Online).
The very first in-class assignment we had that year took about an hour and had about a 25% bigger impact on our grade than annotating did.
Not saying that grades are the end goal but it felt like a slap in the face that the exploration of such a deep topic just.. didn't matter.
https://xkcd.com/877/
Maybe that's the point?
Are you an artist? A woodworker? Metalsmith? ... start recording your work and post it to youtube. I guarantee people will be willing to pay extra for the thing you built (I certainly would).
(edit: formatting)
> The slop-acalypse that so many of us fear, when people will stop looking at anything made by humans and only look at things made by machines—why hasn’t that happened yet?
Unfortunately, I'm pessimistic here. I don't think the slop-acalypse is held back by taste or an appreciation for "thickness". I think there's already very successful slop media in the world (e.g. see microdramas). In other words, it is happening, but like anything else, it's happening in a non-evenly distributed way.
And that's because when Hokusai sat down to print that fourth draft, people had recently started exporting prussian blue dye to Japan; prior to that point, he just straight up didn't have access to that striking blue colour that dominates the print.
> If you allow for the existence of secret treasures that can only be accessed with effort and analysis, then you empower the elitists and the snobs. “Buddy, don’t even talk to me until you’ve been in the cave!”
I don't agree with this statement. Being a snob and/or elitist means looking down upon others. If you appreciate these 'secret treasures' without being a dick about it, everybody wins.
It's almost as though the author thought about and cared about the content and exact words he chose. "Thick or Treat" and "Thickening agents" and "Slim pickings" even immediately evoking imagery of a thin slop gruel in my own head.
By using an unexpected word I think I thought more critically about it, in fact. Had the author used depth I would've immediately had more superficial imagery in my own head.
This doesn't hold for all things - I would, for example, describe a wine as having "depth" but probably not "thickness" because in the case of potables "thickness" also implies a particular sort of textural feel, but I do like the idea of a piece of art as being thick with meaning as opposed to deep. A book which is deep can be reread multiple times, but a book which has thickness just sounds like a book that can live on your bookshelf and be paged through year after year for decades, with not only the content to support it but also the sturdiness to hold up to the use.
That reasoning is the thickness not the amount of code that powers it though they are somewhat interrelated.
Without the ultimate postmodern truth that there is none, that deep skepticism of power especially and always of oneself, how do people decide what to embrace? Whatever is effectively sold to them, no questions asked. There isn't an instinctive worry about but an almost survival-level embrace of mass messaging - the way is to be safe in the crowd, not to doubt it or to worry about its power in society and its effect on you.
And without believing in the Enlightenment vision of the transformative power of our minds to make a better humanity, expressed especially in art as the pinnacle of human expression and acheivement, art is ruled out and actually threatens your worldview (and that reactionary messaging) of powerlessness and survival.
And you'll need to add an apology for using that phrase too.
But especially funny and bewildering in this case is that you have this in your About section of your HN user account:
TLDR: AI and generic pop culture artifacts have something in common - a lack of a certain type of depth that makes art great.