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by sergiosgc
4101 days ago
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I meant it for the target book: A technical book, teaching a corpus of knowledge, designed to be complete. The comment I was replying to specifically targeted the author, implying that the end result could never be good. The inferred implication is not solid, specifically because the knowledge in the text does not require interpretation using knowledge about the author (or its environment). A technical book, which condenses technical knowledge, has most of its content in the lines, not between them. There is no second reading of the book, there is no hidden meaning, there is no need for secondary information for interpretation of the text. If you feel more comfortable viewing the subject under a reduction to the absurd lens, think about criticizing a published mathematical proof based on the opinions about the author's personality. The proof is either valid or invalid, and all the information needed to prove its validity must be contained in the proof (or it is invalid). Your examples are not relevant, as they are not designed to be complete. The first is a view of an ancient text through a modern perspective, and the second is a fragment of a communication ensemble. A technical text, unlike these, is designed to be complete. I stand by my original position, although I was perhaps too broad in painting it. I didn't expect it to be read as extensible to literary texts. |
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As for "designed to be complete", I don't know what that means in this context. Perhaps you mean stand-alone, as it does not depend on having access to other resources? Otherwise, the only definition I can come up with is tautological, as it covers everything the author meant it to cover. A technical book on "advanced differential equations" is not complete in that it assumes the reader already has a basic understanding of differential equations.
I have read many technical papers. They are still human documents. They can and often do contain meaning between the lines. I am reviewing some of the literature in my field from the 1960s, and it's easy to infer the social context. For a simple example, in most of the papers refer to a generic chemist as 'he' and clerical staff as 'she'. More subtly, there can be veiled attacks, like when one paper says "it's surprising that X and Y are connected" and then a paper a few years later says "as many of the people who founded X came out of Y, it's not surprising that there's a close connection between the two". It's not hard to read between the lines and infer that the second author is chiding the first author for not knowing the history.
More classically, in 'Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems' Galileo put the words of Urban VIII into the mouth of the character Simplico. The pope and many others interpreted that as a hidden attack on the pope, despite being a book on scientific ideas.
Have you never come across mathematical proofs written by kooks? The language, and frequent references to numerology and other occult philosophical traditions make it effectively impenetrable. Unfortunately, I can't find one easily. Visit your local math department and ask around - it's not uncommon. Sometimes much more sane versions of these get published, like http://www.math.utep.edu/Faculty/sewell/AML_3497.pdf .
In any case, math proofs are supposed to be interesting. Otherwise we would just hook up a theorem prover to a journal publisher. If you look at the early papers in statistics, they use games of chance as examples. Sure, the proofs stand alone, but from the text you can also determine that gambling was not strictly taboo during that era.
BTW, I agree with the statement that none of Zed Shaw's internet persona is evident in this book. By all accounts, it is a good resource for learning how to program. In my cursory scan, I found no hidden or double meanings. However, that's a specific property of this book, I disagree that that's true of every arbitrarily chosen technical book.