What does reading a great novel or starting a garden specifically accomplish? People do some things for reasons that aren't easily quantifiable. It seems to me that you are starting from the viewpoint that everything has to prove its worth before you accept it, even if millions of people before you have found it fulfilling and worthwhile, which does not seem productive.
If you had never read a book before, and someone was trying to convince you to try it, what could they point to that would fulfill all your criteria? Would it be enough to say it makes you smarter? That's not very specific. It sharpens your thinking? Makes you more empathetic? That would all seem like 'vague undecipherable gibberish' if you had no experience with it. They might resort to saying that it can connect you with a great dialogue that has been occurring for over two thousand years, but as you say, the fact that people have been doing it for thousands of years doesn't make it interesting or valuable.
Seeing a study that some part of the brain responds more quickly for up to 90 minutes after reading or that people with gardens live 0.28 years longer on average would not make me want to do those things more, because those are NOT the benefits of doing those things. You have to figure out what you're supposed to do with your one human life. Science is one tool, culture is another. Neither of them makes the other superfluous.
> What does reading a great novel or starting a garden specifically accomplish?
It accomplishes many things - specifically granting entertainment, pleasure, etc that practitioners like.
> It seems to me that you are starting from the viewpoint that everything has to prove its worth before you accept it
I'm starting with the viewpoint that there are literally thousands of various different practices out there have have existed for a long time and have been practiced by many people. Many of these are complete bullshit. How do you filter out the good from the bad/useless?
> even if millions of people before you have found it fulfilling and worthwhile
Millions of people have found many many different things fulfilling and worthwhile over the ages, some of these things we've since realized are bullshit/bad. Do you accept every single belief/practice based on how popular it has been?
> If you had never read a book before, and someone was trying to convince you to try it, what could they point to that would fulfill all your criteria?
They could say: it's entertaining/interesting/pleasurable, they could say that knowledge/insights are contained in books, that different/interesting perspectives and other people's thoughts are contained in books (which are objective facts), etc. Saying 'it makes you smarter' is vague and unconvincing.
Unless (and even if) you choose to live your life as a sort of survey of all possible human practices, the things you will never have the chance to try will vastly outnumber the things you try.
Also, many practices confer the best benefits after a significant time commitment, so even if you optimize for number of things, you still won't actually be experiencing them in the same way as their proponents do.
Given the vast amount of experiences, practices, and tools available to us, I think it's pretty reasonable that most people seek out at least some level of external curation.
Sure, but the person I replied to seemed quite adamant and specific in rejecting external curation.
He wants to know for sure, he'll have to see for himself. That's actually one of the very useful generalizable lessons you can learn on this path.
Of course you won't be able to experience everything? That's a feature of the universe. You won't even be able to hear about everything. It's up to the individual to decide their breadth/depth ratio, but at a certain point you need to, pardon my french, "shit or get off the pot".
"Our first priority is to minimize sylliness, but I think our second priority should be to maximize silliness. And 'thirty squared twelfths' is certainly sillier."
Sure, but is discarding Type Theory and Category Theory really fair with a phrase like "All of modern mathematics"? Especially in terms of a connection with computer science.
Arguably, type theory is more influential, as it seems to me all the attempts to actually formalize the hand-wavy woo mathematicians tend to engage in are in lean, coq, or the like. We've pretty much given up on set theory except to prove things to ourselves. However, these methods are notoriously unreliable.
If 1% of the last 10 billion people to live were academics and published on average 5 papers (many only had one, i.e. their dissertation/thesis, but a small fraction will have had dozens or hundreds), that comes to 500 million.
I'm curious, do you think it's an order of magnitude too low or too high?
Saying something and doing something are different. They claim it is true, but they haven't demonstrated it by doing it.
If a company says they've built the fastest car in the world, a reasonable response is "ok, let's see it drive faster than any other car can", even though they already said that it can do that.
The vast majority of readers won't get any information from anything in the article. Why not pseudonymize everything and scramble the place names? I at least appreciate that in principle, I could research the people mentioned. Romanian happens to be intelligible with diacritics removed, but I bet you'd feel differently if you read an article about Mr Ccsrtr and Em Cnr.
If you had never read a book before, and someone was trying to convince you to try it, what could they point to that would fulfill all your criteria? Would it be enough to say it makes you smarter? That's not very specific. It sharpens your thinking? Makes you more empathetic? That would all seem like 'vague undecipherable gibberish' if you had no experience with it. They might resort to saying that it can connect you with a great dialogue that has been occurring for over two thousand years, but as you say, the fact that people have been doing it for thousands of years doesn't make it interesting or valuable.
Seeing a study that some part of the brain responds more quickly for up to 90 minutes after reading or that people with gardens live 0.28 years longer on average would not make me want to do those things more, because those are NOT the benefits of doing those things. You have to figure out what you're supposed to do with your one human life. Science is one tool, culture is another. Neither of them makes the other superfluous.
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