I bring back wisdom from earlier days, which I am certain modern youth will appreciate and admire!
The dead art of music journalism in modern terms. Back in the days of print, it was photocopied memetic street fighting, where you would attempt to come up with a more killer meme than your opponents in dialectic, one so compelling it would reshape the past as well as the present. Thank fuck music journalism is utterly obsolete. I still write, converse and think like that, though. AN ASSERTION IS PROVEN BY SOUNDING REALLY GOOD.
The Four Hour Work Week, which I have just read. I have no plans to go into Internet marketing. But the book tries to explain to the modern generation what the hell we did all day before the Internet. The phrase "poverty jetset" was commonplace. I spent 1993 sitting on the front porch with my housemate the burnt-out ex-Communist, reading all the newspapers, drinking coffee and smoking Lucky Strikes. The book describes the slacker dream in a way that The Official Slacker Handbook doesn't quite communicate out of its time.
It has encouraged me to open GMail every now and then instead of having it open all the time, to read books and to appreciate that I have a really quite excellent job, in which I am not only paid quite well to do some good for the world but can work from home pretty much any time I need to, and go to the office because high-bandwidth communication means a lot less nasty surprises for the sysadmin.
Underground. Wow, communications technology really was shit in the late '80s. No wonder we were still so impressed with photocopiers.
(no subject)
Date: 2010-09-24 11:21 pm (UTC)To the extent that you care about believing accurately, you should worry about this a lot!
(no subject)
Date: 2010-09-24 11:30 pm (UTC)(I really did write that just for you. It's still true, of course.)
Dealing with humans' wacky little ways is art, and working a reality distortion field is part of that.
Analysis is intersubjective, rather than purely subjective or objective, which is why the field is interesting at all. And after the fact.
Of course, I blow my foot off on a regular basis.
[I originally wrote the above with appropriate hedging then deleted that to leave them as assertions.]
p.s.: you need to read and understand
(no subject)
Date: 2010-09-24 11:31 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2010-09-25 07:40 am (UTC)I do know
hirez - marvellous chap! Could you give an example of the sort of thing from his writing that I need to be reading? Thanks!
My recommended reading on this subject is "Why do humans reason?" The usual caveats about evolutionary psychology apply, but it still remains a useful source of hypothesis generation and pulls together a lot of fascinating research to tell a compelling story. If you haven't already read it, though, you should first read "Biased assimilation" - a classic paper on confirmation bias in the way we interpret research.
Cheers!
(no subject)
Date: 2010-09-25 08:40 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2010-09-25 09:19 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2010-09-25 10:41 am (UTC)All the gubbins above is far more to the subjective end, where the desired end is for other people to feel a particular thing.
Argument by assertion is a bad argument for less subjective things, but it has a name because it works well enough to convince people in practice.
Art is a mirror held up to shape the world and frequently in my anecdotal observation works by argument by assertion. People's perception of the past change as well as the present. The reality distortion field is the Steve Jobs superpower.
Furthermore, all the above is not necessarily, or even usually, evil in intent or practice.
(no subject)
Date: 2010-09-25 10:43 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2010-09-24 11:36 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2010-09-25 07:48 am (UTC)But while we're talking musical jokes, did you see Bobby McFerrin hacks your brain with the pentatonic scale? Incredibly charming.
(no subject)
Date: 2010-09-25 08:38 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2010-09-25 09:27 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2010-09-25 10:36 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2010-09-25 12:42 pm (UTC)Watching a small intelligence develop is the most fascinating experience ever. It really is.
(no subject)
Date: 2010-09-24 11:27 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2010-09-24 11:31 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2010-09-25 12:00 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2010-09-25 12:04 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2010-09-25 09:46 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2010-09-25 09:58 pm (UTC)with the expectation that something unprovable cannot sound good by the nature of it's lack of truth (or whatever your point is)? Then YES.
I second your points about art and what-not from that other comment.
(no subject)
Date: 2010-09-25 10:34 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2010-09-26 04:00 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2010-09-26 04:21 pm (UTC)