| For 1. See my comment later when pg asks me to lay out some points and I do so. For 2. Yes, citations can make you look more authoritative. But here's the thing. I believe pg is falling into a trap that most of us smart people fall into: we believe in our own smartness, and we believe in our own logic, therefore we believe what we think about a subject… regardless of whether we've actually investigated or researched the topic whatsoever. Here's an example you'll see often on HN: "People still use/pay for x?" or "Hackers don't buy things." For example: porn. Several times I've seen the idea expressed on HN "people can't possibly be making money from porn" or "does anyone still pay for porn?" (Not a genuine question, but implication that of course, nobody does.) The fact is, the porn industry makes $13 billion a year. Yes, even with the internet and piracy. All it takes to see this is to go to Wikipedia but people don't bother. Because they "know." There is so much written on the value of public speaking, from greater thinkers than pg and myself. Aristotle wrote a lot of silly things but he was also inarguably a great thinker and the father of rhetoric. He wrote a treatise in 400 bc about the uses of public speaking, which intellectuals throughout the ages have used as one of the cornerstones of a true liberal education. I'm not saying Aristotle is correct. I'm saying it seems ridiculous for an intellectual with the reach and influence of pg to write bald statements like "So are talks useless? They're certainly inferior to the written word as a source of ideas" without even a perfunctory investigation of the history of the thing. Nobody questions it, so I question it. Actually, the way pg opened the essay -- Having good ideas is most of writing well. -- is actually a technique called "begging the question". Which was dubbed a material fallacy. By Aristotle. Just sayin'. |