[halfjew22]

Rather than downvote, can someone point out why they dislike this comment?

On an article on Wittgenstein's honest and fluid thinking style, I posted something similar to what the current top comment has described as the most interesting part of W's process.

Thanks in advance.

[wsy]

You didn't contribute to the talk about Wittgenstein, but exclusively talked about yourself and things you do.

In addition, instead of explaining the relationship of your activities with Wittgenstein (that could have been an on-topic contribution), you ask the reader to watch recordings.

[halfjew222]

How would recommend explaining the relationship of my activities W?

Honest question, I’d love to not come across as such a moron.

Thanks for the feedback.

[wsy]

Let me start by saying that it is great to see how you deal with the feedback you get, this is not an easy feat.

Some more preliminaries: When I write a comment on HN, I first ask myself: what is the message I want to send to potential readers? And then I put some effort into expressing it as good as I can. After reading your comment, I had a hard time identifying any message, and I think the reason is that you employed the method of giving us your raw thoughts without considering which message you would like to send. When I first read your comment, I didn't even bother to dig deep enough to decipher the content; if you don't spend effort in writing, why should I spend so much effort in reading? Now, after having watched the first video and read your comment five times, I understand the structure, but still only fragments of the content.

Let me give one example what I think you could explain, based on the partial understanding I gained: it seems that you consider it very important for people to capture and communicate their thoughts 'unfiltered', as they happen. If you could relate that to Wittgenstein's philosophy, that would be an on-topic comment. (I am not very familiar with Wittgensteins philosophy and don't see how that would obviously follow from his philosophy, maybe Wittgenstein experts immediately see it).

I see the dilemma you are in: you want to exemplify the style, and I ask you for something which is impossible to do in this style: polishing and refining a message until it is easy to read and understand. However, I also would say that your experiment - convincing the reader by exemplifying the approach - has failed, so it seems you anyway need to reconsider your approach.

Finally - and I hope it doesn't come over as patronizing - I think only few exceptional people have such clear thoughts that conveying them without any editing is a win for a large readership. I know for sure that my thoughts are initially much too chaotic. Maybe Wittgenstein was able to do it. You and me are far away from that level.

[halfjew222]

Absolutely! I truly don't want to come across as that downvote seeking troll. I really want to share and engage in rich conversations with interesting people online.

I really appreciate your feedback. I think you touched on a key point of contention for me that I need to work very hard on:

> if you don't spend effort in writing, why should I spend so much effort in reading?

I come at this from precisely the opposite angle: "I could pour my heart into something and have it ignored because it's too long, so I'm just going to throw everything at the wall and see what sticks."

Obviously, I know this is a poor solution. I'm actually building a website instead that I believe solves my problem and many more. That will give me the motivation required to put in the effort up front to polish things up a bit more.

The problem, for me, boils down to one thing: we have a content discovery problem. Low energy bullshit rises easily, while content that takes a while to parse rises quite quickly.

The saying "a picture is worth a thousand words" is perfect here. It's also roughly 1,000 times more difficult to read, parse, understand, and provide feedback for content such as mine than to like a gif on Reddit, for example.

Again, thank you for the feedback. I've copied it into my notes (highly recommend Bear app for mac / iOS if you're in the market) and will meditate on it and hopefully improve through it.

If you're interested in the project I'm working on that I believe solves this problem, here's some stuff I wrote about it:

https://medium.com/@michaellustig/knophy-or-how-were-going-t...

https://medium.com/@michaellustig/step-by-step-explanation-o...

[orhmeh09]

I hope you don’t take offense, but I would imagine some people are turned off by your self-promotion, the length of your post, and a tone that could be interpreted as pompous.

[halfjew222]

Thanks for the feedback. Much appreciated.

[wallace_f]

Can I ask what your background is and how old are you?

You seem actually quite genuine and to have good faith-in-discussion, and if that is correct I really implore you to value that about yourself. They are good and rare qualities that the world needs more of.

Also, I hope you do not take offense to this, but I can't help but recommend that if you haven't already, to see a professional about potential social disorders. Your comments consistently read with a naievity of social skills. I'm sorry and I dislike to compartmentalize anyone has disordered, but I think it could possibly help. I could also be completely wrong: after all, all I know of you is a few internet comments.

[halfjew222]

I’m 26 (or 27 I can’t remember) and I’m just a guy trying to do a bunch of good in a digital age that seems to care more and more about short term benefits and appeasing low attention spans than using technology to better humanity.

I’m a shitty Android (now attempting web / react / react native to build knophy.com) developer that’s been fired from every job I’ve had (besides being a soccer referee in high school) and I like to think outside the box. I don’t like being like everyone else. I don’t take offense very easily, and I don’t have a very easy time finding people to discuss these deep ideas with.

I do my best, and have actually found a couple from this very thread, but I don’t think the current landscape of the Internet is set up to value the kinds of contributions I’d like to bring. I’m designing knophy.com to hopefully help fix my personal problem.

Here’s some reading on that system if you’re interested and would like to help spread the idea:

overview: https://medium.com/@michaellustig/knophy-or-how-were-going-t...

benefits off use: https://medium.com/@michaellustig/step-by-step-explanation-o...

[perfmode]

Your rhetorical style undermines the arguably prescient content of your speech.

[halfjew222]

What style would be better to use? I don’t even know what you mean by rhetorical style, apologies.

Thanks for the feedback.

[coverup]

I think they mean that the unedited, the stream-of-consciousness style you're employing, while "honest" in that you give the reader the the full paper trail of where your conclusions are coming from, has a low signal-to-noise ratio, making it tedious to read.

It's surprising to me that someone compared your work to Wittgenstein's. His writing contains an extraordinary amount of dense, finely-honed philosophical content per page--rather the opposite of the 'let it all hang out' approach you seem to be taking. Which isn't to say either one is strictly better, although the previous commenter may disagree with me.

If you're looking for more feedback, I would suggest that you read. Read orders of magnitude more than you write, in fact, no matter how much you write. No matter how old or how experienced you are, philosophy is a party that has been going on for thousands of years and you have only just arrived. There is always more to read, and for any novel idea or theory you have that is keeping you up at night pondering it, there is almost certainly someone whose entire life's work was dedicated to the exploration of that one idea.

Read Wittgenstein on language, sure, but you're gonna then need Frege and the logical positivists for context. Then read into Hilbert and Russell's work on the foundations of mathematics, and then about Gödel's famous theorems and how they affected that program. There's a rewarding parallel to be drawn between what the conclusion of Wittgenstein's Tractatus says about the philosophy of language and what Gödel's incompleteness theorems say about the foundations of math, but you gotta do the work to get there.

Stream-of-consciousness is a well-worn technique at this point, and not just in writing or speaking. Read about theatre improvisation and jazz, and hip hop, and what those artists have to say about their processes, and read theorists and critics who are skeptical of the very possibility of what you're calling "honesty" in your writing.

Read history. Read about propaganda campaigns and why they worked, and past instances of "information radiation". Look up all the 20th century theorists who warned us about the power of television to make even the most horrific atrocities banal. It's all been said before.

Contributing new thought is hard work, and one of the reasons why it is hard work is that you have to first understand the entire conversation that had been already happening right up until you joined the party. Read anything and everything you can get your hands on, and then read more.

[halfjew222]

>I think they mean that the unedited, the stream-of-consciousness style you're employing, while "honest" in that you give the reader the the full paper trail of where your conclusions are coming from, has a low signal-to-noise ratio, making it tedious to read.

Certainly fair, great point!

>If you're looking for more feedback, I would suggest that you read. Read orders of magnitude more than you write, in fact, no matter how much you write. No matter how old or how experienced you are, philosophy is a party that has been going on for thousands of years and you have only just arrived. There is always more to read, and for any novel idea or theory you have that is keeping you up at night pondering it, there is almost certainly someone whose entire life's work was dedicated to the exploration of that one idea.

Whenever I am not working, spending time with my wife, or writing, I am reading or listening to books or podcasts on philosophy, thinking, history, etc. Great recommendation.

>Gödel's incompleteness theorems say about the foundations of math, but you gotta do the work to get there.

Have you heard of GEB? Fascinating you'd make that connection here. We could almost call that a Golden Braid on its own.

>Read history. Read about propaganda campaigns and why they worked, and past instances of "information radiation". Look up all the 20th century theorists who warned us about the power of television to make even the most horrific atrocities banal. It's all been said before.

Please point me to some reading about exactly what atrocities they warned of. I'd love to read more. I never claim any ideas are new, as I don't really believe that to be possible. Rather, there are no new ideas under the sun. This points at a more deeply ceded philosophy that we won't get to in this conversation.

>Contributing new thought is hard work, and one of the reasons why it is hard work is that you have to first understand the entire conversation that had been already happening right up until you joined the party.

If you provide any more feedback for me here, PLEASE, let me know where something like I'm working on has been done before as I'm searching far and wide for help.

https://medium.com/@michaellustig/knophy-or-how-were-going-t...

https://medium.com/@michaellustig/step-by-step-explanation-o...

[WAthrowaway]

You are not half as smart as you think you are and it is annoying

[Retra]

In what sense are you being honest with yourself if you can't put yourself in an objective enough frame of mind to see where the down-votes come from?

[halfjew222]

There’s no feedback.

I truly wouldn’t post something if I didn’t feel it was relevant so constructive feedback (as per HN guidelines) is much more useful than silent downvotes.

[Retra]

The downvote is feedback. It's feedback that other people don't find your post relevant. You can constructively review how you expect other people to find it relevant and imagine the reasons why they wouldn't.