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Furcas comments on Open Thread: February 2010 - Less Wrong
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I just finished reading Jaron Lanier's One-Half of a Manifesto for the second time.
The first time I read it must have been three years ago, and although I felt there were several things wrong with it, I hadn't come to what is now an inescapable conclusion for me: Jaron Lanier is one badly, badly confused dude.
I mean, I knew people could be this confused, but those people are usually postmodernists or theologians or something, not smart computer scientists. Honestly, I find this kind of shocking, and more than a little depressing.
The remarkable and depressing thing to me is that most people are not able to see it at a glance. To me it just seems like a string of obvious bluffs and non-sequiturs. Do you remember what was going on in your head when you didn't see it at a glance?
It's difficult for me to remember how I used to think, even a few years ago. Hell, when there's a drastic change in the way I think about something, I have trouble remembering how I used to think mere days after the change.
Anyway, one thing I remember is that I kept giving Lanier the benefit of the doubt. I kept telling myself, "Well, maybe I don't understand what he's really trying to say." So the reason I didn't see the obvious would be... lack of self-confidence? Or maybe it's only because my own thoughts weren't all that clear back then. Or maybe because the way I used to parse stuff like Lanier's piece was a lot more, um, holistic than it is now, by which I mean that I didn't try to decompose what is written into more simple parts in order to understand it.
It's hard to tell.