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- [00:00]
A
Unlike Schopenhauer, you're an industrial philosopher, like an industrial designer. Your philosophy is designed for the masses. Like everybody else on Twitter, we're philosophizing for wide adoption. People suggest you read the great books. Read Aristotle and Lichtenstein and all the supposedly great philosophers. I mean, I've read almost all that stuff and I've gotten very little value from it. Where I have gotten value is the philosophizing of people on Twitter like you. Anybody who wants to read philosophy, I would just tell them to skip it and go read David Deutsch.
- [00:38]
B
You are not wrong. I can't stand any of the philosophers you talked about. I don't like Plato either. Every other piece of philosophy I picked up and put down relatively quickly because they're just making very obscure arguments over minutae and trying to come up with all encompassing theories of the world. Even Schopenhauer falls into that trap when he tries to talk to other philosophers. He's at his worst when I like him, is in his shorter essays. That's where he almost writes like he's on Twitter. He would have dominated Twitter. He has high density of ideas, very well thought through, good minimal examples and analogies. You can pick it up and read one paragraph and you're thinking for the next hour. I think of a better writer, a better thinker and a better judge of people and characters thanks to what I read from him. Now he's writing from the early part of the 19th century. Whenever he wanders into topics that are scientific or medical or political, he's obviously off base. That stuff doesn't apply anymore. But when he's writing about human nature, that is timeless when it comes to anything about human nature. I say go read the Lindy books, the older books, the ones that have survived the test of time. But if you want to develop specific knowledge, get paid for it, do something useful, then you want to stay on the bleeding edge. That knowledge is going to be more timely and obsolete more quickly. Those two make sense. What doesn't make sense to me is just reading stuff that's not Lindy or that's not about human nature but is old. I also shy away from stuff that's low density in the learnings, like history books. I like the Lessons of History by, well, Duran because it's a summarization of the story of civilization, which was his large 12 volume series. But I'm not going to go read the 12 volume series. I've read plenty of history. I know he's referring to these kinds of things. So I'm not just taking his word for it on high level concept, but at the same time at this point in my life I want to read high density works. You can call it the TikTok disease or the Twitter generation, but it's also just being respectful of our time. We already have a lot of data, we have some knowledge. Now we want wisdom. Now we want the generalized principles that we can attach to all of the other information we already have in our minds. We do want to read high density work, but I would argue that Schopenhauer is very high density work. All my favorite authors are very high density. Deutsch is extremely high density. Borges is very high density. Ted Chiang is very high density. The old Neal Stephenson was very high density. Then he just cut high volume, high density, high everything. But the best authors respect the reader's time and Schopenhauer is very much in that vein.