You're looking at Less Wrong's discussion board. This includes all posts, including those that haven't been promoted to the front page yet. For more information, see About Less Wrong.

lukeprog comments on February 2013 Media Thread - Less Wrong Discussion

2 Post author: RobertLumley 02 February 2013 01:36AM

You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.

Comments (100)

You are viewing a single comment's thread. Show more comments above.

Comment author: lukeprog 11 February 2013 09:41:26AM *  1 point [-]

When Books Could Change Your Life.

Here's a snippet:

When we’re children, all the books we read are handed down to us, like the Ten Commandments, by grownups, who seem like, and sort of are, a different order of being from ourselves. They’re the gods of childhood, bigger and older and more experienced; they know more than we do, imparting what wisdom to us they think we can bear, empowered to tell us what to do. I’m over 40 now, no longer by even the most charitable definition a young adult, and I’m starting to realize, in something like panic, that I don’t understand anything, and that nobody else seems to know any more about it than I do. There aren’t any grownups.

I would amend this to say there are a few grownups, and that the next step after noticing one's ignorance should be to extinguish it if possible.

Another snippet:

Books that unabashedly purport to supply all the answers sell like Hula-Hoops or Viagra. This genre is called “wisdom literature” if it’s old enough to be respectable or “self-help” if it’s by someone who’s still alive and making money off it, and ranges in credibility and earnestness of intention from the Tao te Ching and Aurelius’ Meditations to shameless dogshit like The Secret.