If I may make a suggestion (both to the author and to the commenters): why not devote less words to people and more to the issues.
I think it irrelevant whether this Crowley guy was an addict or an evangelical, or whatever.
What matters are the issues. I would have liked to read more about what exactly Yvain believes and why, and less about some trip to Asia and parents of a person I never heard off and frankly don’t care about.
PS don’t hesitate to summarize Godel, Escher Bach. It might be helpful. And why not summarize the bible while you’re at it. Who cares. If anyone does mind, they are free to read the original, right? No one loses anything.
Actually, we lose whenever we think the abbreviated map we have is significantly closer to the territory than it actually is, because then we have less motivation to look at the territory.
One reason that marketers sometimes make a point of listing all the things their product is not, is specifically to overcome people’s default setting of “I already know what that is” and “A friend of mine already tried something vaguely resembling that and it didn’t work”.
So, attempting to summarize difficult-to-accurately-summarize things isn’t necessarily doing anyone a service.
If I may make a suggestion (both to the author and to the commenters): why not devote less words to people and more to the issues.
I think it irrelevant whether this Crowley guy was an addict or an evangelical, or whatever. What matters are the issues. I would have liked to read more about what exactly Yvain believes and why, and less about some trip to Asia and parents of a person I never heard off and frankly don’t care about.
PS don’t hesitate to summarize Godel, Escher Bach. It might be helpful. And why not summarize the bible while you’re at it. Who cares. If anyone does mind, they are free to read the original, right? No one loses anything.
Actually, we lose whenever we think the abbreviated map we have is significantly closer to the territory than it actually is, because then we have less motivation to look at the territory.
One reason that marketers sometimes make a point of listing all the things their product is not, is specifically to overcome people’s default setting of “I already know what that is” and “A friend of mine already tried something vaguely resembling that and it didn’t work”.
So, attempting to summarize difficult-to-accurately-summarize things isn’t necessarily doing anyone a service.