Somewhat amusing, but it should not be surprising that most of the commentary on old sequence posts is people reading them and engaging with the ideas for the first time.
I’d say rules against necro-commenting are a good tool for the Dark Side, ensuring no discussion progresses beyond a single burst of activity and wasting a lot of time repeating the same arguments again and again.
An interesting claim I came across recently is that most people view the Internet as opening up the past, but that isn’t quite right—the past was always accessible, through books and stories and so on. What the internet does that is strange is extend the present into the past, so that content created in 2001 or 2012 or so on can be indistinguishable from content created in 2016, if the formatting, context, or dynamics are the same.
That is, one doesn’t expect Jane Austen to return any fan letters, but sometimes when you respond to a four-year old comment, you get a response within a day.
the past was always accessible, through books and stories and so on.
I don’t know if that’s right. The past was always accessible to some degree, but never before as an overwhelming exhaustive array of minutiae. It’s precisely because of that level of detail that this past looks so much like the present.
Too late—it’s been 3 and a half years.
“epistemologically ” is a word, but it’s hard to tell when to instead say “epistemically”.
Somewhat amusing, but it should not be surprising that most of the commentary on old sequence posts is people reading them and engaging with the ideas for the first time.
That’s ridiculous: whenever I want to comment, I always observe that I am reading 4-year-old arguments and keep on scrolling.
Necro-commenting isn’t usually frowned upon around here.
I’d say rules against necro-commenting are a good tool for the Dark Side, ensuring no discussion progresses beyond a single burst of activity and wasting a lot of time repeating the same arguments again and again.
An interesting claim I came across recently is that most people view the Internet as opening up the past, but that isn’t quite right—the past was always accessible, through books and stories and so on. What the internet does that is strange is extend the present into the past, so that content created in 2001 or 2012 or so on can be indistinguishable from content created in 2016, if the formatting, context, or dynamics are the same.
That is, one doesn’t expect Jane Austen to return any fan letters, but sometimes when you respond to a four-year old comment, you get a response within a day.
I don’t know if that’s right. The past was always accessible to some degree, but never before as an overwhelming exhaustive array of minutiae. It’s precisely because of that level of detail that this past looks so much like the present.
Yes, it’s the time language that got me.