That article is very poorly argued. Your argument is more or less correct in those fields where the progress of scholarship has a monotonous upward trend, in the sense that knowledge is accumulated without loss, and all existing insights continuously improved. This is true for e.g. Newtonian physics, and indeed, nobody would ever read Newton’s original works instead of a modern textbook except for historical interest.
What you fail to understand, however, is that in many fields there is no such monotonous upward trend. This means that in the old classics you’ll often find insight that has been neglected and forgotten, and you’ll also find ideas that have fallen out of fashion and ideological favor, and been replaced with less accurate (and sometimes outright delusional) ones. Almost invariably, these insights and ideas are absent from modern texts, even those dealing specifically with the old authors, and there is often nothing comparable being written nowadays that could open your eyes to the errors of the modern consensus.
As a rule of thumb, the softer and more ideologically charged a field is, the more such cases you’ll find where the modern range of mainstream opinion has in fact regressed away from reality relative to old authors. In economics, for example, you’ll find a lot important insight in The Wealth of Nations that modern economics textbooks, and even modern treatments of Adam Smith, are silent about.
Even in hard sciences, when it comes to questions that raise deeper philosophical issues, revisiting classics can be a fruitful source of ideas. For example, Julian Barbour developed his ideas by studying the history of mechanics and relativity, and Arthur Ekert claims that the idea of quantum cryptography first occurred to him due to an insight he gathered from the classic EPR paper. (Ekert writes, “I guess I was lucky to read it in this particular way. The rest was just about rephrasing the subject in cryptographic terms.”)
Another point you’re neglecting is that truly good writers are extremely rare. Many classic works have remained in print after so many years exactly because people who wrote them were such good writers that virtually none of the modern authors working in the same field are able to produce anything as readable.
Yes. Anyone who thinks Chaucer and Shakespeare are valueless for being old has misunderstood the field. As long as humans are savannah apes, they will find their works of value. We still read Chaucer and Shakespeare not because they are antecedents, but because they’re good now.
Are Shakespeare’s comedies—containing mainly sexual innuendo, mistaken identities, abuse, and puns, and using the same extremely improbable plot devices repeatedly - really great works of art? They’re good, but are they really first-tier?
Do any of Shakespeare’s tragedies contain insights into human nature that are as important or as difficult for you to discover on your own as those you would find in a Jhumpa Lahiri novel? I think not. (Honestly, is King Lear deep? No; just dramatic and well-written. Any idiot knows by Act II what will happen.)
We still read Shakespeare today partly because Shakespeare was great when he wrote; but partly because Shakespeare was a master of individual phrases and of style, and literature departments today are dominated by postmodernists who believe there is no such thing as substance, and therefore style is all that matters. (Or perhaps the simpler explanation is that people who make and critique films tend to be more impressed by visual effects than by content; and people who make and critique books tend to be more impressed by verbal effects than by content.)
We still read Shakespeare today partly because Shakespeare was great when he wrote; but partly because Shakespeare was a master of individual phrases and of style, and literature departments today are dominated by postmodernists who believe there is no such thing as substance, and therefore style is all that matters.
Shakespeare’s centrality in English Lit curricula comes from it’s historic place in the Western canon. Post-modernists are distinguished in particular by their opposition to any kind of canon.
And yet, I know English lit people who simultaneously love postmodernism and Shakespeare. There is a pervasive emphasis of style over content, which I have been attributing to postmodernism; but maybe I oversimplify.
Postmodernism isn’t really characterized by a position on which works should be read so much as how they should be read. While postmodern thinking opposes canons it also supports reading culturally relevant texts with a critical/subversive eye. Shakespeare is rich with cultural context while also being complex and ambiguous enough to provide a space for lit critics to play with meanings and interpretations and get interesting results. Hamlet, which is far and away Billy Shake’s best work, is particularly conducive to this. They do the same thing with Chaucer, actually, particularly the Wife of Bath’s tale. I don’t think it is about style over substance but about the freedom to play with cultural meaning and interpretation. You can’t say Hamlet is short on substance, anyway.
But the extent to which authors like Chaucer and Shakespeare have become less central in lit departments is almost entirely due to this crowd- it’s archetypal postmodernism which gives genre films and television the same importance as the historical Western canon.
Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead probably boosts the Bard’s popularity in the pro-postmodern scene.
Another reason to be familiar with the canonical works in a culture is precisely because they’re canonical. It’s like a common currency. By now, English-speaking culture is so rooted in Shakespeare that you’d be missing out if you didn’t recognize the references.
Any idiot knows by Act II what will happen.
We do now! But apparently, the original Elizabethan audiences went in expecting a happy ending—and were shocked when it turned out to be a tragedy. Tricky fellow, that Willy S.
Another reason to be familiar with the canonical works in a culture is precisely because they’re canonical. It’s like a common currency. By now, English-speaking culture is so rooted in Shakespeare that you’d be missing out if you didn’t recognize the references.
Yes. Same reason some familiarity with the King James Version of the Bible is culturally useful.
I didn’t mean they would know how it would end—I meant they would know that Lear used shallow indicators to judge character, and Cordelia would turn out to be the faithful daughter.
It looks like audiences since before Shakespeare’s time would have gone in knowing the outline of the story. But I’m mostly replying to confess—the same Wikipedia article that I myself quoted makes it clear that there was no really happy ending to King Lear until 1681. I wasn’t paying close enough attention.
This counts as vast insight. When looking at the output of lots of ridiculously smart people, you discover that most intelligence is used to justify stupidity, and the most important thing about most new ideas is that they are wrong.
Much of Plato’s thought comes from Pythagoras, Parmenides, Heraclitus, and Socrates. If I were to pick an ancient philosopher that didn’t have obvious intellectual antecedents, I would choose Thales.
In The Failures of Eld Science, Eliezer’s character points out that most scientists were never trained to recognize and navigate a genuine scientific controversy; instead, we hand our undergraduates the answers on a silver platter and have them do textbook problems. He proposes that if scientists had first had to think through and defeat phlogiston themselves, they would have been less stymied by the interpretation of quantum mechanics.
Similarly, I think I’m better off for having encountered some of the grand old systems of philosophy in their earliest and most viral forms, without all the subsequent criticisms and rebuttals attached. Of course I ran the risk of getting entrapped permanently in Plato or Nietzsche, but I learned things about rationality and about myself this way, and I don’t think I would have learned those had I started by reading a modern digest of one or the other (with all the mistakes pointed out). (Of course, I have since read modern critiques and profited from them.)
On the other hand, some Great Books schools like to teach higher mathematics by having the students read Euclid, and I agree that’s insane and not worth all the extra effort.
Interesting about pushing students through Phlogiston. Without it being required of physics majors, I took “philosophy of science” as an undergrad philosophy minor and read, among others, Popper. It has stuck with me like one of those viruses, let me know if I have much to gain by finally dropping some of what I think I learned from him. I personally loved looking at all science afterwards and listening in all discussions and thinking: “is this a difference that makes a difference?” Is there testable difference here or can I just skip it?
In a graduate course on superconducting electronics I once taught a wildly simple theory of electron pairing treating the electron wave functions as 1-d sine waves in the metal. I told the students: “the theory I am teaching you is wrong, but it illustrates many of the true features of the superconducting wave function. If you don’t understand why it is wrong, you will be better off thinking this than not thinking this, while if you get to the point where you see why it is wrong, you will really understand superconductivity pretty well.”
It never occurred to me to try to insert Popper into any of the classes I was teaching. I was not a very imaginitive professor.
By the way, on your name orthonormal, on what basis did you choose it? :)
On the Euclid point, it depends on where you’re starting from and what you’re trying to do. I’ve seen people who thought they hated math, converted by going through some of Euclid. The geometrical method of exposition is beautiful in itself, and very different from the analytical approach most modern math follows. If you’re already a math enthusiast, it would not benefit you quite as much.
On the whole I’d agree that most of the time it’s better to focus on high-quality up-to-date summaries/textbooks than high-quality classical sources.
But I’d suggest a few caveats:
1) It is much easier to find high-quality classics than it is to find high-quality contemporary stuff. Everyone knows who Darwin was, I don’t even know how to find a good biology textbook, and I personally got a lot more out of reading and thinking about Darwin than by reading my high school biology textbook. This is a consideration for students and autodidacts, less so for smart and well-informed teachers who know how to find the good stuff.
2) Many summarizers are simply not as smart as the greats, and don’t pick up on a lot of good stuff the classics contain. This is less important for a survey that has only a small amount of time to spend on each topic, but if you want deep understanding of a discipline, you will sometimes have to go beyond the available summaries.
3) The ancients are the closest we have to space aliens; people who live in a genuinely different world with different preconceptions.
That post says, “You might find it more enjoyable to read Plato rather than more modern work just as someone else might prefer to have their philosophical arguments interspersed in Harry Potter slash,” and was posted February 25, 2010. The first chapter of Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality was posted Feb. 28, 2010. Coincidence?
Eliezer actually did mention the allegedly preposterous idea of getting some kind of wisdom (philsophical? ethical?) from Harry Potter in a comment reply back in the OB days. I’m too busy/lazy to find a link though.
It feels like lots of details deployed to justify your advice to “read the classics” and lots of the details deployed to justify the advice “avoid the classics” are basically compatible and some more nuanced theory should be available that is consistent with the totality of the facts like “In cases X and Y read the classics, and in case N and M avoid them” and perhaps the real disagreement is about the nature of the readership and which case better describes the majority of them… or the most important among them?
For example, I think maybe people in their late 20′s or older who were clicky while young and are already polymaths might be helped reading the classics in domains where they want to do creative work, while most 17 year olds would do better to get summaries of the main issues and spend some time arguing with peers about them. For example, I’ve heard Mandlebrot had a knack for digging up neglected gems and resurrecting citation trees with 90 year gaps where all authors in the tree except for him were dead. This seems like a useful technique for boosting a career as a specialized intellectual, but I wouldn’t suggest the trick to a 12 year old.
Scholarship: Thumbs up.
Classic Scholarship: Thumbs down http://brainstormers.wordpress.com/2010/03/03/sobre-ler-os-classicos/
Just in case someone forgot all the Teacher Pasword, Cached Thoughts, and related posts from which I got the link to the above text.
diegocaleiro:
That article is very poorly argued. Your argument is more or less correct in those fields where the progress of scholarship has a monotonous upward trend, in the sense that knowledge is accumulated without loss, and all existing insights continuously improved. This is true for e.g. Newtonian physics, and indeed, nobody would ever read Newton’s original works instead of a modern textbook except for historical interest.
What you fail to understand, however, is that in many fields there is no such monotonous upward trend. This means that in the old classics you’ll often find insight that has been neglected and forgotten, and you’ll also find ideas that have fallen out of fashion and ideological favor, and been replaced with less accurate (and sometimes outright delusional) ones. Almost invariably, these insights and ideas are absent from modern texts, even those dealing specifically with the old authors, and there is often nothing comparable being written nowadays that could open your eyes to the errors of the modern consensus.
As a rule of thumb, the softer and more ideologically charged a field is, the more such cases you’ll find where the modern range of mainstream opinion has in fact regressed away from reality relative to old authors. In economics, for example, you’ll find a lot important insight in The Wealth of Nations that modern economics textbooks, and even modern treatments of Adam Smith, are silent about.
Even in hard sciences, when it comes to questions that raise deeper philosophical issues, revisiting classics can be a fruitful source of ideas. For example, Julian Barbour developed his ideas by studying the history of mechanics and relativity, and Arthur Ekert claims that the idea of quantum cryptography first occurred to him due to an insight he gathered from the classic EPR paper. (Ekert writes, “I guess I was lucky to read it in this particular way. The rest was just about rephrasing the subject in cryptographic terms.”)
Another point you’re neglecting is that truly good writers are extremely rare. Many classic works have remained in print after so many years exactly because people who wrote them were such good writers that virtually none of the modern authors working in the same field are able to produce anything as readable.
Yes. Anyone who thinks Chaucer and Shakespeare are valueless for being old has misunderstood the field. As long as humans are savannah apes, they will find their works of value. We still read Chaucer and Shakespeare not because they are antecedents, but because they’re good now.
Are Shakespeare’s comedies—containing mainly sexual innuendo, mistaken identities, abuse, and puns, and using the same extremely improbable plot devices repeatedly - really great works of art? They’re good, but are they really first-tier?
Do any of Shakespeare’s tragedies contain insights into human nature that are as important or as difficult for you to discover on your own as those you would find in a Jhumpa Lahiri novel? I think not. (Honestly, is King Lear deep? No; just dramatic and well-written. Any idiot knows by Act II what will happen.)
We still read Shakespeare today partly because Shakespeare was great when he wrote; but partly because Shakespeare was a master of individual phrases and of style, and literature departments today are dominated by postmodernists who believe there is no such thing as substance, and therefore style is all that matters. (Or perhaps the simpler explanation is that people who make and critique films tend to be more impressed by visual effects than by content; and people who make and critique books tend to be more impressed by verbal effects than by content.)
(Don Quixote, though, is golden. :)
Shakespeare’s centrality in English Lit curricula comes from it’s historic place in the Western canon. Post-modernists are distinguished in particular by their opposition to any kind of canon.
Good point!
And yet, I know English lit people who simultaneously love postmodernism and Shakespeare. There is a pervasive emphasis of style over content, which I have been attributing to postmodernism; but maybe I oversimplify.
Postmodernism isn’t really characterized by a position on which works should be read so much as how they should be read. While postmodern thinking opposes canons it also supports reading culturally relevant texts with a critical/subversive eye. Shakespeare is rich with cultural context while also being complex and ambiguous enough to provide a space for lit critics to play with meanings and interpretations and get interesting results. Hamlet, which is far and away Billy Shake’s best work, is particularly conducive to this. They do the same thing with Chaucer, actually, particularly the Wife of Bath’s tale. I don’t think it is about style over substance but about the freedom to play with cultural meaning and interpretation. You can’t say Hamlet is short on substance, anyway.
But the extent to which authors like Chaucer and Shakespeare have become less central in lit departments is almost entirely due to this crowd- it’s archetypal postmodernism which gives genre films and television the same importance as the historical Western canon.
Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead probably boosts the Bard’s popularity in the pro-postmodern scene.
Another reason to be familiar with the canonical works in a culture is precisely because they’re canonical. It’s like a common currency. By now, English-speaking culture is so rooted in Shakespeare that you’d be missing out if you didn’t recognize the references.
We do now! But apparently, the original Elizabethan audiences went in expecting a happy ending—and were shocked when it turned out to be a tragedy. Tricky fellow, that Willy S.
Yes. Same reason some familiarity with the King James Version of the Bible is culturally useful.
cf Richard Dawkins on his lifelong love of the King James Bible
I didn’t mean they would know how it would end—I meant they would know that Lear used shallow indicators to judge character, and Cordelia would turn out to be the faithful daughter.
It looks like audiences since before Shakespeare’s time would have gone in knowing the outline of the story. But I’m mostly replying to confess—the same Wikipedia article that I myself quoted makes it clear that there was no really happy ending to King Lear until 1681. I wasn’t paying close enough attention.
Reading the masters (the little I’ve done of it) has taught me the following things:
Almost no ideas are good
Almost no ideas are new
Plato’s ideas were, at least, new. And (per 2) they’re the most influential ideas ever to be put on paper. There’s value in seeing that for yourself.
This counts as vast insight. When looking at the output of lots of ridiculously smart people, you discover that most intelligence is used to justify stupidity, and the most important thing about most new ideas is that they are wrong.
Much of Plato’s thought comes from Pythagoras, Parmenides, Heraclitus, and Socrates. If I were to pick an ancient philosopher that didn’t have obvious intellectual antecedents, I would choose Thales.
One counterpoint:
In The Failures of Eld Science, Eliezer’s character points out that most scientists were never trained to recognize and navigate a genuine scientific controversy; instead, we hand our undergraduates the answers on a silver platter and have them do textbook problems. He proposes that if scientists had first had to think through and defeat phlogiston themselves, they would have been less stymied by the interpretation of quantum mechanics.
Similarly, I think I’m better off for having encountered some of the grand old systems of philosophy in their earliest and most viral forms, without all the subsequent criticisms and rebuttals attached. Of course I ran the risk of getting entrapped permanently in Plato or Nietzsche, but I learned things about rationality and about myself this way, and I don’t think I would have learned those had I started by reading a modern digest of one or the other (with all the mistakes pointed out). (Of course, I have since read modern critiques and profited from them.)
On the other hand, some Great Books schools like to teach higher mathematics by having the students read Euclid, and I agree that’s insane and not worth all the extra effort.
Interesting about pushing students through Phlogiston. Without it being required of physics majors, I took “philosophy of science” as an undergrad philosophy minor and read, among others, Popper. It has stuck with me like one of those viruses, let me know if I have much to gain by finally dropping some of what I think I learned from him. I personally loved looking at all science afterwards and listening in all discussions and thinking: “is this a difference that makes a difference?” Is there testable difference here or can I just skip it?
In a graduate course on superconducting electronics I once taught a wildly simple theory of electron pairing treating the electron wave functions as 1-d sine waves in the metal. I told the students: “the theory I am teaching you is wrong, but it illustrates many of the true features of the superconducting wave function. If you don’t understand why it is wrong, you will be better off thinking this than not thinking this, while if you get to the point where you see why it is wrong, you will really understand superconductivity pretty well.”
It never occurred to me to try to insert Popper into any of the classes I was teaching. I was not a very imaginitive professor.
By the way, on your name orthonormal, on what basis did you choose it? :)
On the Euclid point, it depends on where you’re starting from and what you’re trying to do. I’ve seen people who thought they hated math, converted by going through some of Euclid. The geometrical method of exposition is beautiful in itself, and very different from the analytical approach most modern math follows. If you’re already a math enthusiast, it would not benefit you quite as much.
But there are more readable modern textbooks which use the geometrical method of exposition; I just taught out of one last semester.
I envy your students.
On the whole I’d agree that most of the time it’s better to focus on high-quality up-to-date summaries/textbooks than high-quality classical sources.
But I’d suggest a few caveats:
1) It is much easier to find high-quality classics than it is to find high-quality contemporary stuff. Everyone knows who Darwin was, I don’t even know how to find a good biology textbook, and I personally got a lot more out of reading and thinking about Darwin than by reading my high school biology textbook. This is a consideration for students and autodidacts, less so for smart and well-informed teachers who know how to find the good stuff.
2) Many summarizers are simply not as smart as the greats, and don’t pick up on a lot of good stuff the classics contain. This is less important for a survey that has only a small amount of time to spend on each topic, but if you want deep understanding of a discipline, you will sometimes have to go beyond the available summaries.
3) The ancients are the closest we have to space aliens; people who live in a genuinely different world with different preconceptions.
That post says, “You might find it more enjoyable to read Plato rather than more modern work just as someone else might prefer to have their philosophical arguments interspersed in Harry Potter slash,” and was posted February 25, 2010. The first chapter of Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality was posted Feb. 28, 2010. Coincidence?
Upvoted because it gives us hope that we’ll see those Harry/Draco scenes in MoR after all.
Eliezer actually did mention the allegedly preposterous idea of getting some kind of wisdom (philsophical? ethical?) from Harry Potter in a comment reply back in the OB days. I’m too busy/lazy to find a link though.
Is this it?
Completely agreed. I wrote very much the same thing in How to Do Philosophy Better.
Indeed. If you’re asking students to read the initial source material, there’s a 90% chance you’re doing it wrong.
Wow. I disagree exactly.
I think some justification would be helpful for your readers, especially those who don’t know about your relatively high personal efficacy :-)
You asserted something similar and with more original content right next door and I think your implicit justification was spelled out a while ago in the article For progress to be by accumulation and not by random walk, read great books. I’m curious if these links capture the core justification well, or is more necessary to derive your conclusions?
It feels like lots of details deployed to justify your advice to “read the classics” and lots of the details deployed to justify the advice “avoid the classics” are basically compatible and some more nuanced theory should be available that is consistent with the totality of the facts like “In cases X and Y read the classics, and in case N and M avoid them” and perhaps the real disagreement is about the nature of the readership and which case better describes the majority of them… or the most important among them?
For example, I think maybe people in their late 20′s or older who were clicky while young and are already polymaths might be helped reading the classics in domains where they want to do creative work, while most 17 year olds would do better to get summaries of the main issues and spend some time arguing with peers about them. For example, I’ve heard Mandlebrot had a knack for digging up neglected gems and resurrecting citation trees with 90 year gaps where all authors in the tree except for him were dead. This seems like a useful technique for boosting a career as a specialized intellectual, but I wouldn’t suggest the trick to a 12 year old.
I think those links are about right, as is the analysis. Thanks.
Could you elaborate?