> ”Much reading after a certain age diverts the mind from its creative pursuits. Any man who reads too much and uses his own brain too little falls into lazy habits of thinking, just as the man who spends too much time in the theaters is apt to be content with living vicariously instead of living his own life.”
"The people told me, however, that the big ear was not only a man, but a great man, a genius. But I never believed in the people when they spake of great men - and I hold to my belief that it was a reversed cripple, who had too little of everything, and too much of one thing."
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Religious_and_philosophical_...
> From all this it may be concluded that thoughts put down on paper are nothing more than footprints in the sand: one sees the road the man has taken, but in order to know what he saw on the way, one requires his eyes.
I can imagine that all human deepness is, not unlike the very sofisticated feathers of the peacock, just a tool to increase status & SMV.
It falls apart rather quickly without the tell-tale signs of a tortured model, like modelling our solar system as the motion of circles because you won't admit the ellipse. You can do it, but you probably just need a better model.
For starters, the over-focus on the individual misses competition at level above and below, genes and groups. Secondly, it glosses over emergent phenomena too glibly. If you try to model a presidential election in terms of quantum physics and general relativity, you won't get very far. I can even point out an emergent phenomenon that radically changes this calculus, the human frontal lobes. Unlike most animals, we can suppress our immediate reactions and get mental time and distance from the world, to remap our motivations and act in ways completely absurd from the point of status and sexual market value, like suicide bombings. Status and sexual market value drop to dead zero. You can try to tie it back to status and sexual market value, passing through the activity of the frontal lobes, which would only prove my point about emergent phenomena and a tortured model.
"For every complex problem there is an answer that is clear, simple, and wrong." - H. L. Mencken
People who are truly out of the market like postmenopausal women often feel a lack of motivation and their physical activity measurably decreases.
https://www.amazon.com/Amusing-Ourselves-Death-Discourse-Bus...
(edit) Social media / the internet more generally enables 2-way communication in a way that was not possible in either print nor TV culture. Conceptually it lowers barriers to entry to near-zero for communicating one's ideas & learning from others. Earlier forms depended much more heavily on gatekeepers. Is a more nominally democratic form of media culture than this even possible?
Doesn't this depend a lot on what and how we're reading? I put a lot more thought into some passages from a book than a Stack Overflow code snippet. HN posts fall somewhere in between, and sometimes even those can permanently reshape how I think about something.
If I were to say, "America had a negative impact in geopolitics when it invaded Iraq," it's like you responded with "I'm sorry, but that just seems anti-American."
See Marshall McLuhan and Neil Postman for better arguments.
It’s a subtle message. Technology giveth and technology taketh. Use of any technology is a trade off.
If you only consume and don’t create, your mind gradually loses its capacity for creativity [and you will eventually have to reacquire it, the same way a comatose patient needs to relearn walking].
But since when is all reading "education"? I see a lot of people reading a lot of trash and could be spending their time reading Dostoevsky, or better yet plotting their own murder + burglaries !
Yes, read Dostoevsky and the classics. There is so much to learn and to enjoy.
But remember that great authors didn't discover deep truths of human nature from books alone, but from their attention to the experiences of real life.
“When we read, another person thinks for us: we merely repeat his mental process. In learning to write, the pupil goes over with his pen what the teacher has outlined in pencil: so in reading; the greater part of the work of thought is already done for us. This is why it relieves us to take up a book after being occupied with our own thoughts. And in reading, the mind is, in fact, only the playground of another’s thoughts. So it comes about that if anyone spends almost the whole day in reading, and by way of relaxation devotes the intervals to some thoughtless pastime, he gradually loses the capacity for thinking; just as the man who always rides, at last forgets how to walk. This is the case with many learned persons: they have read themselves stupid.” - Arthur Schopenhauer