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My favorite is to read Plato as a set of advertisements for the Academy. "Come to the Academy," they say, "and partake in conversations like this!"

(This is why Phaedrus ends with Socrates arguing that you cannot learn anything by reading, only through discussion with a teacher.)

Not a lot of people read Plato but pointing out the horse was filled with troops isn't a spoiler.

And how much Plato and Herodotus have you read? Nearly all of Western intellectual history pretty strongly disagrees with your argument.

Our government is actually set up, quite intentionally, to avoid making this possible. It's one of the core purposes of a republic. You can go back and read Plato discussing the exact idea that democracy is dangerous because the poor will vote to rob the rich.

Post author here. I'd still recommend going over to the MobilRead forums; and picking up an older Kobo device (like the Aura HD ^_^). They don't even need any user registration (https://www.mobileread.com/forums/showthread.php?t=223155). There are full firmware dumps, and its super easy to modify. There are even some examples of running full blown Linux on them (https://www.mobileread.com/forums/showthread.php?t=220350). Plus you can bypass Nickel and stick to something really nice like Koreader for reading; or Plato or CoolReader.

You gotta figure something's gone horribly wrong if you're still reading Plato for anything.

Anyone got some decent resources to wash away the taste of fail?

What kind of "better results" are we looking for?

Simply producing more STEM graduates does not necessarily lead to better results when so many of them sell out to companies with business models that are adversarial to humanity at large.

Perhaps reading Plato or Marcus Aurelius could lead those graduates to take a more ethical approach in their technological endeavors.

Because human behavior boils down to Plato vs Aristotle. If you don't read both, then there is a segment of the population who's actions and opinions are going to be a complete mystery to you.

I’m reading Plato and this might look fun to try out.

Wait, what? Plato is definitely heavy reading, and worth your full conscious attention!
Don't waste Plato by reading him when you're about to fall asleep!

Plato is an amazing resource.

Its articles strike the perfect balance between intellectual rigour and general accessibility. It combines the traditional encyclopedic format with the authorship of academic experts. And if that wasn't enticing enough, the articles are published for free and list the author's contact information at the bottom.

As a philosophy graduate I would say that learning philosophy solely from books would be a very ambitious / dangerous attempt. The philosophical books can be very persuasive for the beginner in the field, leading to many misconceptions. I would recommend to take part in some (university/on-line) courses, but not in one, but at least two from different teachers.

As for the books, Plato (Socrates dialogues) is must have to understand the field. Also it's fun to read, so it's great to begin with :) The Nicomachean Ethics of Aristotle is another beginner friendly book which lays field for others to follow; it's much more practical/friendly than the Metaphysics, which should be approached only with an assistance of a good teacher (unless you're a genius like Avicenna or Thomas Aquineas).

The pragmatic in me would rather meet Plato and Locke in a one semester summary than reading Plato or Locke and working out the exegesis out of it. I agree these are different experiences that bring different kind of pleasure though.

Yes, I also hit wikipedia to know how the Fringe and Life on Mars would end because the fillers were too much to bear.

Ok, this is fascinating. Even beyond escaping my own echo chamber, it's really neat to escape other echo chambers.

Let's escape the woke bubble:

  1. How to Be an Antiracist 
  2. White Fagility 
  3. Between the World and Me

The books it recommends are pretty diverse - Maya Angelou to Peter Drucker to Plato.

Or how about the Trump bubble:

  1. Time to Get Tough 
  2. Righteous Indignation 
  3. Going Rogue

Lots of religion here. What if we escape atheism?

  1. Letter to a Christian Nation 
  2. God is Not Great 
  3. The God Delusion

Hmm. Not so much religion here... but we got Aldous Huxley, Bruce Li and Richard Feynmann.

I think... I've got a lot of reading to do. I LOVE this tool.

I've had a gutful of this reductionist tripe.

Yes, Web 2.0 allows uneducated fools to become movie directors, artists, musicians, writers, etc but let me tell you NOBODY is mistaking this stuff for high art or culture. Quality will still rise to the top, and people will still be willing to pay for quality. If the amateur is as good as the pro, then great, Web 2.0 has uncovered a new talent.

Put another way, the people using Web 2.0 technologies to create rubbish were NOT going to be reading Plato, Kafka and Nietszche had Web 2.0 not existed. These are two mutually exclusive sets. What Web 2.0 has done is given these amatuers a voice that will likely not even be heard by most. The real artists will still create great works irrespective of the noise, and they will continue to be recognised because people aren't stupid and can spot quality when they see it.

No one is suggesting that the regulat joe and the pro are equal in their skills to produce good work.

I was reading Plato recently and this stood out:

> When they meet together, and the world sits down at an assembly, or in a court of law, or a theatre, or a camp, or in any other popular resort, and there is a great uproar, and they praise some things which are being said or done, and blame other things, equally exaggerating both, shouting and clapping their hands, and the echo of the rocks and the place in which they are assembled redoubles the sound of the praise or blame—at such a time will not a young man's heart, as they say, leap within him? Will any private training enable him to stand firm against the overwhelming flood of popular opinion? or will he be carried away by the stream? Will he not have the notions of good and evil which the public in general have—he will do as they do, and as they are, such will he be?

People have been complaining about what you're complaining about for thousands of years. What I find truly puzzling -- given the supposed madness of crowds -- is that things are going so well.

According to a loose interpretation of Plato in The republic referencing the story of The Ring of Gyges anonymity basically ruins people.

IMHO we'd need what we can't easily have, single-confirmed-identity-accounts for everyone. If Tim Berners Lee had been more of a pessimist, a historian, and a psychologist he might have baked in some end to end encryption with public/private key pairs and account centrality. But he didn't. I'm curious if the USA or any state power could have required an SCIA for everyone. Maybe it could have come from Apple? I could see some kinda of pre-AOL online thing being baked into MacOs, maybe.

But yea, Facebook tried it and people made a fuss. We really kinda need it. It being a lack of wide spread anonymity for online personas. Invisibility really does bring out the worst in people.

Ah someone did not read Plato?

It is the Gyges ring parable.

A man find a ring that makes him invisible (total privacy). And then he does steal, introduce himself in houses and watch women undress and rape them ... and then he becomes a bloody tyran.

The moral of the story is invisibility/privacy makes people bad because moral behaviour is a result of the look of the other on your actions.

Needless to say Plato was an asshole. So is conclusions was to create the Republic where the wise would be hidden from the masses, control the masses, censor them ...

Greek myths however said you could evade from the look of the other but not the one of your own conscience and that the chtonian gods (Eryhnies & al) would come and get you.

I think that people are mostly having a conscience, but that the lack of transparency favors the one having none (psychopaths) and that psychopaths are attracted to power like pedophile are attracted to teaching kids.

Thus, I am puzzled that knowing this we let the more powerful have the most privacy. Hence my fight for the transparency of the most powerful persons, the exact opposite of today's law. As a result, I think privacy is actually a bad thing.

What the hell. Here's my list of literature everyone should at least try (in no particular order):

Homer: both the Iliad and Odyssey

Sophocles: Oedipus the King (read it - far better than you might think)

Plato: The Apology of Socrates

Sappho's fragmentary poems (the translation by Anne Carson titled If not, winter is especially good)

Dante: Inferno

Shakespeare: at least one tragedy, one history, one comedy and one of the final "problem plays"

John Donne: a bunch but if none else Elegy XIX To His Mistress Going to Bed

Philip Larkin: he didn't write much; read the complete poems (if nothing else, look at "Born yesterday")

T.S. Eliot: "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock", "Return of the Magi", "Hollow men"

Ernest Hemmingway: A Clean Well-Lighted Place

Herman Melville: Bartleby, the Scrivener

Joseph Conrad: Heart of Darkness and The Secret Agent

Gustave Flaubert: Madame Bovary

George Orwell: Any and all of the essays, but especially "Shooting an elephant" and "A hanging"

Stendahl: Red and Black

James Joyce: A Portrait of The Artist as a Young Man

Andre Dumas: The Three Musketeers

Samuel Beckett: Waiting for Godot

Tom Stoppard: Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead

I'll shut up, except to say that although I agree with some of the people on the thread that reading "great books" just because they're considered great is stupid, these books were all a joy. I remember them each pretty happily and return to a few of them now and again and just browse through for awhile. Some "great" books really are great, and if you're reading for yourself (not as a forced assignment), they're often well worth the effort (because, yes, none of them reads like a magazine article).

A liberal arts education teaches you many useful things: grammar, for example.

Read his opening paragraph again.

"As usual I get a ton of mail on subjects that are controversial, and one of the more painful ones was the fact that the Dropping out is probably not for you post gave people the impression that I'm against studying the arts, literature or any other non hard science."

Awkward, no? That's because it's a run on sentence.

The things that a liberal arts education teaches you are not always obvious. Of course you can read Plato or Homer or Augustine by yourself, but unless you're in a collegiate environment, it's very very easy to be lazy.

How many times have you picked up a book, skimmed through it, and never opened it up again? How many times have you actually read a book, and then for some weird reason, forgotten all of its contents very soon after? Formal schooling forces you to reengage with texts again and again. Formal schooling forces you to be critical of yourself and your own work before someone else has a crack at it. All of these things can be accomplished by a very motivated and disciplined individual. But how many of us are actually that motivated and that disciplined?

I had a philosophy professor once who was very upset after she'd graded our papers on Plato's Republic.

She gripped the lectern and looked at the floor for a few seconds sadly.

She looked up.

"What happened here, guys? You're all so smart. This was a real let-down. No, the Republic is not a sacred text. No, we're not here to worship it. But there's also such a thing as employing the critical spirit in the wrong way. We're here to understand this book, to engage with its ideas seriously, not to tear it apart without thought to feel superior."

"Again, this is not an object of worship. But this book has been preserved for 2500 years by human beings, most of whom had to copy each page by hand. A long chain of brilliant people from across generations worked to put this paperback in your hand. They did this in part because they thought it was worth the effort of preserving it for you. If, after a minute or two of thought, we find a glaring flaw that makes Plato looks like a blithering idiot, it would be wise to examine our critique in a spirit of humility. Without humility and charity, it's impossible to learn anything."

"After we've understood, then we can critique."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Principle_of_charity

This idea is equally valuable outside the context of interpreting philosophical texts.

Everything she said is unfashionable, not only in academia but in public life. Political entertainers earn their keep by deliberately distorting their opponents' arguments with easy mockery. A lot of social media reward mindless criticism.

But the most productive, insightful online communities have some element of exclusion and some punishments (karma, banning, etc.) for repeated violations of the principle of charity.

The author seems to take the goal of studying philosophy to be knowledge/technique collection, for an eventual goal of some type of measurable output. In other words, she expects philosophy to have something in common with the study of physics that it just doesn't have. One reads Plato (for example), not to collect facts about the world, but because Plato's Socrates still represents one of the most noteworthy and admirable ways of being towards the world. You read Plato to learn how to comport yourself better towards death, injustice, and most of all, your own ignorance.

The bias I'm trying to get at is shown here:
> And if philosophy is about having certain experiences, like poetry, but then it would seem to be a kind of entertainment rather than a project to gain knowledge, which is at least not what most philosophers would tell you.

Dividing experience into "knowledge" and "entertainment" belies an ignorance of much of the subject matter Plato treats. Many works of ancient philosophy are still some of the most worthwhile texts to read because they are education in how to live. They represent some of the most admirable and imitable responses to the puzzle/experience of being a fragile creature who knows that it will die but doesn't know why it's here nor quite how to find out. Scientific inquiry can treat "why" questions when we understand "why" to mean "by what means?" but not when we understand "why" to mean "for the sake of what?" Many today would contend that "why" questions in the latter sense are not meaningful nor admit of answers, and you can't present empirical data in rebuttal, nor do much else besides try to inspire a sense of skepticism about their broadest assumptions, habits, etc. And encourage them to read Plato.

As others have observed, many of Aristotle's scientific claims have been falsified, and personally I didn't get much out of reading his Physics. But the Nic. Ethics made a permanent change in the way I think and feel, in part because it revealed to me how incomplete and shallow my justifications about ethics had been my whole life, and that a coherent way of thinking about ethics was possible.

Also, studying the history of philosophy and philosophy of science are the best ways to become aware of the (often questionable) philosophical assumptions that underlie the contemporary scientistic attitude towards knowledge.

This is a github post that tries to pass itself off as a "paper" (because it sounds official, right), and ends with "And that can change the world". Wow that's academic and objective.

Why are we upvoting delusional content that lacks a real understanding of behavior, politics, and law? Because if you want to change the world, a basic understanding of that might help. He could start with Plato and Xenophon and the Trial of the Generals and then progress to Reddit if he thinks crowds are wise and democracy without flaw.

The next time there is an Arab Spring, the people will be able to replace their leaders with code.

Is this serious? It's every bad Silicon Valley joke wrapped up in a document. In the real world, politicians, and armies, and people with power that you don't even know of have been ruling the world for a long time. If you want to break that you gotta be more realistic than quoting a science fiction book and a Github paper.

To create something scalable enough to run an entire nation with no representatives, we created two cutting edge technologies to serve as the foundation of the platform

Is it reasonable to make this statement without showing any code? They seem to have not scaled beyond writing thought on paper. How do you go from that to "leaders being replaced with code"? Is there not a massive gap to be bridged before such audacious claims are made?

Why isn't there more skepticism of something like this?

My apologies if I came across as making some sort of ad hominem attack here based on the grammar in your post. Let me re-iterate: for a non-native speaker, your English is very impressive. Sure, there were a few awkward phrasings and some grammatical errors in your post, but I think I'm much more sensitive to these things than most people are, and it in no way affected my ability to understand the message you were trying to convey. I just so happened to respond to the grammatical tangent in the comments here. :)

Honestly, the intent of my original comment was specifically to legitimize the non-grammar-related part of grot's comment. Looking back, I failed miserably at that, and the conversation centered even more on grammar. I distinctly remember having written something else that I apparently deleted before commenting. Let me go back and make a comment that's actually valuable.

> Of course you can read Plato or Homer or Augustine by yourself, but unless you're in a collegiate environment, it's very very easy to be lazy.

Personally, I can strongly relate to this. I'm very interested in literature, for example, but I'm not very well read. There are plenty of libraries around me and plenty of resources available on the internet to help me self-study, but I just don't do it. I can self-study node.js just fine, but I need some coercion to get into Shakespeare. This is something a formal education in liberal arts can provide. Whether or not it's affordable depends on a variety of factors, so it's hard to make a sweeping statement in support of or in opposition to such a degree. But I think people are very prone to looking at educational choices as business decisions, where a negative ROI is obviously bad. I think this is a limited perspective, but unfortunately, it's a reality a lot of people have to deal with.

The themes/messages are timeless, not the works themselves. Here is my point: Would you rather read Plato, Aristotle, and the like, or the writings of a more "modern" philosopher who had conceivably based his opinions on all three?

And yes, using word timeless twice in my original post does make the argument appear circular. Works are not timeless because they are timeless (circular indeed!) but because their themes are timeless AND they were the first to thoroughly explore those themes.

I don't know why the study paints this as being a strange outcome. This outcome makes sense to me intuitively. Perhaps because we confuse momentary happiness (having fun!) with prolonged mental wellbeing. They are somewhat related to each other, but are not a causal or necessarily even a correlative relationship.

I've never really understood the point of smalltalk (beyond social things where you don't really know anyone). If I'm going to be having a conversation, I like it to be about something. I think having a meaningful conversation signifies that you are actually interested in the other person and interested in knowing what they think. If you think about it from that perspective, that you are actually making deep interpersonal relationships with the people around you, of course you will be happier. The person making smalltalk with a hundred people is someone who is still lonely in some aspect of the term.

It also makes sense in that discussing and thinking about 'deep' issues, you are becoming more knowledgeable about yourself. People who know more about themselves are going to be better able to please themselves (fill their lives with things that make them happy), because they actually know what they like (and what they are like).

Substantive conversations make for a substantive lives. And substantive lives are more enjoyable than empty ones.

This study is sort of just be rediscovering the Platonic theory of pleasure. (Sensual, Esthetic, and Ideal pleasures).

Moral of the story, read Plato (talk about it), be happy.

I had a look. I recognise Allan Hazlett's name, but that's as much as I can say. Epistemology, PoM and stuff are all fairly interesting but depend a lot on the quality of teaching, in my experience.

If you don't want to just read Kenny's ANHWP, and I were to provide a reading list:

* Plato: Meno, Gorgias, Parmenides, Charmides, Apology. If you enjoy it, then try reading The Republic.

* Aurelius' Meditations. Democritus and Epicurus are worth reading about too, to summarise the Greeks. And Zeno's paradoxes.

* meaningness.com as an entry-point to Buddhist philosophy in general.

* Logicomix as an introduction to Russell & his project in Principia Mathematica.

* Mill's Utilitarianism, Hannah Arendt 'The Human Condition', and Henry George 'Progress & Poverty' for politics, history and economy, throw in a bit of Rawls. Schiller's 'The Robbers' is also very much worth reading.

* SEP articles for the classic writers: Augustine, Aquinas, Hume, Kant; then Kripke, Tyler Burge, and Searle present some interesting problems.

Other mentions off the top of my head: Dreyfus, Chalmers, Parfitt, Singer.

There are some great YouTube channels out there that teach to the intelligent adult. Gregory B Sadler, Mark Thorsby, Daniel Bonevac, Carneades.org are the ones I remember being useful. Some good series' are out there: Human, All Too Human; Alan Watts' TV series; The Reith Lectures...

I've missed a ton, of course, this is just stuff I remember enjoying or gaining something from. I hope this list isn't too overwhelming. I'd start with the Greeks, then flick around some YouTube channels, then meaningness, then off into whatever takes your fancy. I don't really fancy digging through MOOCs so sorry I can't recommend any in particular.

My personal favourite philosophers/philosophical writers: Nietzsche, Wittgenstein, Darwin, Hegel, Camus, CS Pierce, Feyerabend, Epicurus.

Well depends on what you consider classics :-)
Go to a second hand shop, bookstore where they sell used books and get whatever you like.
Here is a small list that IMHO would appeal to many HN readers:
- Isaac Asimov (foundation trilogy, robot series, short stories compilations)
- William Gibson (nauromancer, bridge trilogy)
- Douglas Adams (The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy)
- Alfred Bester (The Demolished Man, The Stars My Destination)
- Neal Stephenson (Snow Crash, Cryptonomicon)
- Orson Scott Card (Ender’s game, Speaker for the Dead)
- Fyodor Dostoevsky (Crime and punishment, the idiot, notes from the underground and many more)
- Plato (apology, the republic)
- Bible, Torah, Quran and any other sacred text
- Mythology (Greek, Indian, Norse and o5hers)
And a last one, completely unrelated...
- Clive Barker (Hellraiser series, books of blood)

Plato - The Republic

George Orwell - 1984

  Some from the canon:

Plato: Defence of Socrates, Euthyphro, Crito (translated by David Gallop)

The Modes of Scepticism by Julia Annas and Jonathan Barnes (a beautiful collection of texts from Pyrrhonian scepticism and analysis of their arguments; the best way I know to meet ancient scepticism)

Descartes: Meditations on First Philosophy (The Cambridge University Press edition is very good; it's probably worth buying their Selected Philosophical Writings for a good basic Descartes text)

David Hume: An Enquiry concerning Human Understanding and An Enquiry concerning the Principles of Morals (I recommend the Oxford Philosophical Texts editions)

Wittgenstein: Philosophical Investigations (terribly, terribly difficult, but very rewarding)

  A few contemporary things:

Gilbert Ryle: The Concept of Mind

Willard Van Orman Quine: From a Logical Point of View

J. L. Mackie: Ethics: Inventing Right and Wrong

Thomas Nagel: Mortal Questions (short essays, well-written, very accessible)

Bernard Williams: Ethics and the Limits of Philosophy

Michael Smith: The Moral Problem

  Specialist, technical, odd:

The Frege Reader by Michael Beaney (for modern logic and the beginnings of contemporary philosophy in the analytic style)

J. L. Mackie: The Cement of the Universe: A Study of Causation

William Kingdon Clifford: The Ethics of Belief (he argues, oddly but powerfully, that it's immoral to believe things on insufficient evidence or irrationally - an offense to morality, not just reason)

Ick. Sounds like you need to read a bit more about epistemology. After you have torn everything apart you get a more solid grasp of how to build some semblance of a system up again.

Here's my suggested reading list: Plato to establish a foundation, Descartes's First Meditation (edit: or the skeptics, but I don't really feel the need to subject non-philosophy students to that) to tear it down, Kant to give you a more rounded view (but be careful to note where Kant fails as well), Hume to bring reasonableness into being, Nietzsche to round out the pitfalls of nihilism, and some Neo-Kantianism, evolutionary psychology, and modern ethics to round it out.