notes on Tuesday night

[alexr_rwx]

- Paul Graham is one hoopy frood. Not only does he write books about Lisp and essays about programming, he's put out a lovely essay on the topic of essay-ing, surprise and being observant, and the development of weird situations in society like comb-overs and highschool and English departments. Here's an excerpt:

For example, everyone I've talked to while writing this essay felt the same about English classes-- that the whole process seemed pointless. But none of us had the balls at the time to hypothesize that it was, in fact, all a mistake. We all thought there was just something we weren't getting.

Yes, this was on /., but a lot of you don't read /., and a lot of you who do wouldn't follow a link from it to read an essay about essays by a guy who normally writes about Lisp. But I've read the article, and it's excellent... and I recommend that you read it too. So there!

- Earlier on tonight, Mike and I got our compilers project working, with nearly six hours to spare. *jubilation*

- Everybody likes the new gym at Tech. Everybody. It's lovely, and I'm pleasantly sore :)

- Congrambolations to Tim neuroticmonk on his 100 days of uptime! We're from the band Limozeen!

Comments

[oniugnip.livejournal.com]

>> Writing is too important a subject to be wasted on critical analyses of literature.
> So any work of writing that analyzes literature in a critical fashion is a waste?

At risk of sounding like a coalition of geeks are mounting an attack on your way of life (which I realize is how things generally end up sounding)...

I'm not entirely sure what the Roos means by that, however, I do have a sense of his appreciation for argumentation; he was a master debator (and practitioner of forensics, iirc) in highschool... so one possible interpretation of that sentence is that it's a waste to link expressive writing and literature so closely, which is what Señor Graham was getting at.

Writing is about expressing thought, and thought is often about things that don't happen to be literature; I rather like his suggestion, with the English class redistributed into two classes. There are people out there who don't care very much about literature, and while they're clearly misguided, everybody deserves to get practice with clear expression.

Also, it's not clear to me what he's vilifying, particularly -- really, the "make an interesting essay about one of these things" could be viewed as a less-focused and broader-timescale version of a DBQ.

But I think that the most interesting bit of the essay (or non-essay), is the emphasis on the conflict between truth and persuasion... that's a terribly beautiful idea Graham brings up, how as your audience approaches Perfectly Smart, your argument has got to approach Perfectly True (or at least Perfectly Valid) in order to be persuasive...

So either Something Needs To Be Done about curricula... or it's okay, because the stars are burning out anyway. And also, schools are merely an economic adaptation our society's picked up that keep children out of the workforce longer and longer so the adults can have jobs, as population increases and mechanization makes it so that ever-fewer people are actually picking up heavy things and moving them, and the education that they provide is in fact... totally orthogonal to what most people will do in their professional lives.

Holy crap: average white-collar worker. Uses calculus (or even algebra?) on a daily basis, or ever? Needs to remember about the Holy Roman Empire? Writes scholarly essays about James Joyce? Speaks (or remembers, even), French? Plays dodgeball? ...

[agonistes]

...I just spent half an hour composing a nice response to this, and then LJ ATE IT.

Will get back to you on this when am not swamped with work and things to do.