I only skimmed this post, because I understood it before I read it. A fundamental mistake here is thinking of the book as the primary unit of knowledge—a mistake Elizabeth has covered in one of her recent posts.
Of course you can reference Arthur without having read The Once And Future King. That legend is a story that‘s conveyed in many other books and movies, and sometimes still told orally. So perhaps we should replace this with a category called “Dispersed Books” (DB). The Bible is another example. So is Guns, Germs, and Steel.
By contrast, a truly unread book is one whose stories or arguments aren’t broadly known. You’ve never heard of it, or if you have, you know in advance that you’d sound like an idiot trying to talk about it.
Those are just a couple disagreements. I have many more with the categorization scheme.
But the deeper issue at hand isn’t “how do we know what we know.” It’s “how do we police our discussions with other people“ and “how do we justify our beliefs about what we know?”
In a context where you’re vibing, aka shooting the shit, it’s fine to act like you’re way more informed than you really are. That’s kind of the point.
In other contexts, where you’re presenting yourself as a credible authority, you need to make a clear distinction between “ideas you’re an authority on,” “ideas you’re familiar with” and “books you’ve read.”
The smartest people I’ve listened to do this very carefully.
So if the underlying message of this argument is “it’s ok to shoot the shit,” I agree. If it’s “sometimes stories and ideas can be conveyed by texts other than the original,” that’s trivially true. If it’s “you can make assumptions about the contents of a given book, then opine on the book itself,” that seems very wrong to me.
So if the underlying message of this argument is “it’s ok to shoot the shit,” I agree. If it’s “sometimes stories and ideas can be conveyed by texts other than the original,” that’s trivially true. If it’s “you can make assumptions about the contents of a given book, then opine on the book itself,” that seems very wrong to me.
Prior + Evidence = Posteriors*
“you can make assumptions about the contents of a given book, then opine on [your model of] the book”
I only skimmed this post, because I understood it before I read it. A fundamental mistake here is thinking of the book as the primary unit of knowledge—a mistake Elizabeth has covered in one of her recent posts.
Of course you can reference Arthur without having read The Once And Future King. That legend is a story that‘s conveyed in many other books and movies, and sometimes still told orally. So perhaps we should replace this with a category called “Dispersed Books” (DB). The Bible is another example. So is Guns, Germs, and Steel.
By contrast, a truly unread book is one whose stories or arguments aren’t broadly known. You’ve never heard of it, or if you have, you know in advance that you’d sound like an idiot trying to talk about it.
Those are just a couple disagreements. I have many more with the categorization scheme.
But the deeper issue at hand isn’t “how do we know what we know.” It’s “how do we police our discussions with other people“ and “how do we justify our beliefs about what we know?”
In a context where you’re vibing, aka shooting the shit, it’s fine to act like you’re way more informed than you really are. That’s kind of the point.
In other contexts, where you’re presenting yourself as a credible authority, you need to make a clear distinction between “ideas you’re an authority on,” “ideas you’re familiar with” and “books you’ve read.”
The smartest people I’ve listened to do this very carefully.
So if the underlying message of this argument is “it’s ok to shoot the shit,” I agree. If it’s “sometimes stories and ideas can be conveyed by texts other than the original,” that’s trivially true. If it’s “you can make assumptions about the contents of a given book, then opine on the book itself,” that seems very wrong to me.
Prior + Evidence = Posteriors*
“you can make assumptions about the contents of a given book, then opine on [your model of] the book”
Is there a specific book you haven’t read? Why?
*(Technically it’s P(X | Evidence) = P(Evidence | X)*P(X)/P(Evidence).)