Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by torgoguys 1743 days ago
>I see little value in such lists.

Maybe to people especially interested in the subject, but to those with a casual interest, such lists can be a fun introduction to a subject as it provides a way to write a lot of little vignettes. Witness other comments to this post calling out and talking about some of the things they saw in this list that they liked.

1 comments

The problem is that, sometimes, simplistic introductions do more harm than good to understanding of a subject - especially when they are presented as introductions to a subject.

This list is similar to explanations of quantum computing that claim the qbits solve all versions of the problem in parallel - it may give you a wrong intuition about what the subject even is. In this case, it may make you think that there were actual humans that worshiped all of these gods and only these gods - when in fact, over 3000 years of Egyptian civilization, gods changed and merged and so on; and most likely the very idea of worship and humans' relationship with the gods changed.