On Thu, 2 Aug 2001, Faustine wrote: Jim wrote:

In this context I meant "personality" as in demeanor and attitude, not scholarship and competence.

Opposite sides of the same coin...

I suppose "attitude" can be ambiguous, but it's hardly relevant! Being obnoxious, unpleasant, etc. has absolutely nothing to do with whether or not you know enough about a subject to be worth listening to. Not to name names, but I've met several brilliant people who literally make me want to run whenever I see them coming--but whom I nevertheless respect to the bottom of my shoes for their sheer brainpower. (And in case you haven't noticed, I'm definitely not a respectful sort in general, so it means something.)Thoroughly looking forward to hearing what a person has to say and actively, intensely disliking them is not contradictory in the slightest...

...

Your waste of time is somebodies jewel of the Nile (I have these images of Creationist books I've read flashing through my mind, very unpleasant). So do you keep on finding more of the same or have you got on to something of more value to you? I keep hoping I'll run across a 'new' creationist theory, but they all boil down to the same old same old. I don't remember the last time I finished one of the books . Of course the same can be said about most books, technical or not. And no, I'm not a creationist of any bent outside of the pantheist sort (ie Gaia). I'd say that only about 10% of all books are worth reading. Of those 10%, 90% of their content is wrong (and hence interesting in the sense of why they are wrong)..which really gets down to the crux of the matter for me. Not why they got it right, but why they failed.

Good point. I'm an atheist, but I think Aquinas can worth reading. Marcel (the Mystery of Being), Bataille (Inner Experience), Unamuno(Tragic Sense of Life), Kierkegaard (Either/Or), Heidegger (Sein und Zeit) Schopenhauer (complete works!) also come instantly to mind. I usually have no patience for anything mystical, but these authors have been very valuable to me. Several orders of magnitude above the usual religious mush.

Unfortunately most readers focus on what they like, the positive aspect of the experience, and not the negative. Which from an analytic/comprehension perspective is a stronger viewpoint (or at least seems so to me).

Right--never let anyone do your thinking for you.

...

And there's looking for corroborating evidence... :) Well we all do whether we intend to or not: no matter how much you try there's no getting out from under your experience. I disagree, see Newtons comments about hypothesis and playing with stones on a beach.

More on this in future posts.

but to avoid re-inventing the wheel. "If I have seen further than others, it is by standing upon the shoulders of giants." you know?

That's not what he meant by that. He was saying that what he did was not in and of itself his creation. He was objecting to credit being given the 'Lion of England' when it wasn't the Lion's due (why in his later life he began to publish anonymously).

Hm, okay. Nevertheless, I think the point remains.

Unfortunately this can't be said of most people. Most people will take credit for whatever they can and then advertise it widely. One of the most popular strategies is to 'let them think it was their idea'.

True. But an overwhelmingly large percentage of concepts floating around your head and populating your mental landscape (so to speak) came from somewhere else: if you're creative and original, you make new ones out of the building blocks of the old. But they didn't just pop out of thin air.

Recommending books, on the other hand, has to do with getting people to share an aspect of your mental context. Like that book I recommended on MOUT awhile back: it's not that I agree with its conclusions or the ideology behind it--it's just that it made a powerful impression on the way I think about some of the issues that are most important to me, and went a long way toward providing valuable information I didn't already have. Why wouldn't I be interested in spreading it around. I'm not saying you shouldn't spread it around. I disagree on your 'mental context'. I don't suggest that another person should read a book to understand me per se, but rather to escape the singular view point we all have.

Singular viewpoint?? How so! Talk about different mental contexts... And then, there's always the even less noble-minded egocentric motivation for recommending books: "read as I read, so you may come to think as I do". Discourse as narcissistic propaganda: probably a more common motivation that anyone would like to admit.

For me, the best thing that could happen is that somebody else read it and comes to a different conclusion. It is the dialog that follows that gives the book worth. Something greater than the authors intent, or my own personality happens then.

I think most works that are complex and rich inspire that.. like the ones I mentioned above.

The problem is that many equate reading (even a >lot) with understanding, and in actuality too few people question vigorously enough to ever really 'understand' anything.

Couldn't agree more.

It's not uncommon in our society to hear people say 'He said ...' but they themselves can't explain it in their own terms and context. They can regurgitate, they can't cogitate. Dogma and pedantry. It's why 'arguments from authority are useless' is such a strong tool with respect to deductive/synthetic analysis.

I'm not disagreeing with that at all; I think the real sticking point here gets back to the assumptions which led you to bring up the idea of "singular viewpoint" and the relative meaning(s) of subjective value judgements. I bet a lot would be made clearer to me if you could just back up a little and go into that. ~Faustine.